Chip Makers Eye Move to Multicore
By Jeffrey Burt
Chip makers are aggressively moving forward with plans to add more cores to their processors as a way of improving performance without having to bump up the frequency.
Sun Microsystems Inc., of Santa Clara, Calif., next month will roll out the first of its servers based on its new UltraSPARC T1—formerly code-named Niagara—which holds as many as eight cores. In addition, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. this month unveiled road map details for its Opteron server processors as it tries to maintain what officials say is a technological advantage over rival Intel Corp.
The road map includes releasing a quad-core version based on AMD’s current Opteron chip design in 2007, with the cores connected together via an upgraded version of AMD’s HyperTransport interconnect technology, and supporting a new Level 3 cache. Soon after that, another four-core chip based on a new architecture will be released, officials said.