Dual CPU core chips are coming for desktops and notebooks!

[astro]

AMD to launch dual-core chips in 2005
Company to release dual-core Opterons in same time frame that rival Intel issues its first dual-core chips

A dual-core chip is basically two separate processors on a single chip. Those two processors can outperform single-core processors on most multithreaded applications while running at lower clock speeds and consuming less power.

An application with multiple software threads will run faster on a dual-core processor because the operating system can assign an individual thread to its own processor core. Multithreaded applications running on a single-core processor must wait for one thread to finish before another thread can be processed.

IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc. have already released dual-core chips for high-end servers. The server world is especially primed to take advantage of multicore technology because so many applications for servers are already multithreaded, Williams said.

Earlier this month, Intel announced that it would shift all of its future server, desktop, and notebook processor development projects to dual-core designs. By 2005 Intel expects to have a dual-core chip available for each of those three segments, said Intel President and Chief Operating Officer Paul Otellini last week during the company’s biannual financial analyst meeting in New York.

[catsix]

Damn. It’s time to quit smoking.

[Silentgoldfish]

And yet I still don’t use all the power of the Athlon 2400.

[Ponder_Stibbons]

[Nerd]Oooooooo!!! Neato!! This is the excuse I needed to put off building a new computer![/Nerd]