While the era of tremendous clock speed increases is over, Intel does not expect to hit boundaries regarding transistor count any time soon. The 65 nm fabrication process seems to be perfectly on track, as several demo systems were equipped with dual-core Presler processors based on Socket 775. Intel is aiming at 22 nm manufacturing by 2011, with intermediate steps of 45 nm and 32 nm along the way for 2007 and 2009. Hence, Moore's Law about doubling the transistor count approximately every 18 months seems likely to remain valid for many more years.

Reducing the structure size of microprocessors not only open ups the potential for clock speed increases, but also permits adding more transistors in order to introduce new features or to simply add more cache. However, both of these measures did not always allow for substantial performance gains. The logical conclusion is to borrow an idea from the server and super computer segment, and implement multiple processor cores in one chip.

Parallelism To Decouple Performance Within 3 Years

It sounds like a bold vision, but the idea of multiplying processing performance by merging two or more cores into a single processor is far from science fiction. Looking at the server space, running two or four processors enables considerable performance gains. However, this can only be achieved if software can actually take advantage of the resources. Applications need to be optimized for multi-threaded environments in order to allow the operating system to distribute these workload-bites over all available units. That applies whether these are dedicated cores or logical processors allocated by Hyper Threading.

We must emphasize that both AMD and Intel confirmed that their single-core top models remain the fastest chips with a majority of today's applications, and this will persist until software programs are thread-optimized. Accordingly, Intel refers to the new processors as having the potential for "growth in compute capability".

While Intel expects the delivery of multi-core desktop processors to exceed 70% within the coming 18 months, AMD is far more conservative. Their Athlon 64 FX will remain the undisputed top model for the time being, with the dual-core Toledo behind it. In contrast, Intel's new flagship will be a dual-core Extreme Edition with Hyper Threading.