codename: Clovertown

[Master~Plan]

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When will the madness end? I was looking at dual core laptops the other night. I stumbled across this article and was thinking I should hold out for "microprocessors with four cores inside late this year."

Instead of getting faster clock rates it looks like the processor companies are just makeing processors with existing speeds smaller and packing them together. I was kind of looking foreward to the teraHtz chip, but I guess were rather headed into a multiplicity phase...

 

[astrod00d]

I guess the reason behind it is that they've reached a plateau of sorts on how fast they can clock a processor before it's the same temperature as the sun. They now have to look at freeing up bottlenecks and changing the chip architecture to allow the processing power to continue to rise. AMD has been doing this for years now because they had the foresight to know that it would come to this. Their chip architecture allows their processors to not only outperform equivalent Intel processors, but to do it at a much lower clock speed. This is why their chips run much cooler and consume considerably less power. Intel is finally seeing the light and trying to follow their model but they are doing a poor job of it. AMD's engineers are just much better at this. They did, after all, used to build Intel's chips for them before they split. The only reason Intel still has the majority of the market share (which is losing ground to AMD pretty rapidly) is because they bully merchants into not carrying AMD products. AMD has a lawsuit against them regarding this but I don't know where it stands now.