CPU roadmap: 2007 and beyond
Published: 19 Mar 2007
Q3 2007
AMD goes native
AMD's most significant introduction this quarter, and arguably this year, will be its new quad-core Opteron server and workstation CPU, code-named Barcelona. This chip will be AMD's first native quad-core chip (that is, four cores on one die) of any kind, and it will also feature a brand new architecture and a 65nm manufacturing process. Barcelona will hopefully be an improvement over AMD's current and ill-conceived) Quad FX platform, which features a motherboard that can accept two physical dual-core processors.
One of the chief benefits of a native design will be a unified cache that can balance the processing load between various cores, including letting a single core or two cores use all of the cache — translating, in theory, to faster performance. Under the current scheme that pairs two dual-core chips to make an ad hoc four-core computer, each pair of cores can use only the cache that has been assigned to it. Naturally, the Opteron design will trickle down to desktop chips as well, so consider it a preview for what we hope will come out on the desktop side from AMD before the end of the year.
Intel readies high-end Bearlake chipset
Whether Intel's mainstream Bearlake chipsets come out in Q2 or Q3, Intel confirmed for us that it will be July before X38, the high-end member of the Bearlake family, hits the street. Aimed at gamers and performance enthusiasts, the X38 will feature support for 1,333MHz DDR3 memory, and it also will come with a pair of PCI Express 2.0 graphics slots, which double the data bandwidth of current PCI Express slots from 2.5Gbps to 5.0Gbps. That should translate to great benefits for 3D graphics performance, especially with next-generation games played at high resolutions.
One thing we don't know is whether these dual-slot boards will support only ATI's Crossfire dual graphics card mode, as Intel's 975X motherboards do today, or if Intel and Nvidia will finally come together and add SLI support to an Intel chipset. Since Nvidia has a lucrative business with its own nForce SLI chipsets, we're not holding our breath. At any rate, the Intel X38 chipset should prove popular with gamers for enabling advances in memory and graphics performance.
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