AMD has now announced that it will display its first quad-core processor during 2006, something we can only consider a direct reply to Intel’s earlier launch of its quad-core processor. Intel will launch its first quad-core processors during the fourth quarter while AMD will have to settle with just displaying its equivalent. AMD’s quad-core architecture is expected to be the K8L architecture we’ve earlier reported about and it will be a “genuine” quad-core architecture with four physical cores in the same packaging. Intel’s first quad-core processor will use two separate dual-core dies linked inside the processor.
But K8L is not expected to appear on the market until the middle of 2007, which means that Intel will get a pretty big headstart.
“At an analyst day last month, AMD talked about its plans for the new architecture, which includes L3 cache, 32-bit instruction fetch, dual 128-bit SSE data flow, and dual 128-bit loads per cycle.”
