processors 2008

I know a little of what is coming up - but like many areas of the geek world, this is certainly a very fast paced topic, with updates and changes coming fast and thick.

With the processor market dominated by two giants (AMD and Intel), there is always a level of one-upmanship that exists between the tow companies.

2007 was dominated by the quad core (and dual core) Intel processor, and 2008 is tipped to see the release of six-core processor as a follow up. One of the factors leading to Intel's dominance in the multi-core processor market was the fact that the quad-core of 2007 was so stable and forgiving - allowing a variety of clock settings and tolerances. It is still to be seen if Intel can do it again - releasing a six-core processor is one thing (ok, it is also amazing) but it's stability in real life applications will ultimately determine it's success.

For the Geeks around us - The six-core processor that is in the pipeline (code named "Dunnington") is tipped to use 45nm manufacturing technology, jamming around 1.9 billion transistors into the single chip. It will apparently have 16Mb of L3 cache, and will be manufactured as a "native" mutli-core. That is that all core's and cache(s) will be included on a single die for manufacturing - as opposed to the quad core's which are effectively 2 dual cores printed side by side.

AMD are a bit quiet on the big multi-core market, but they are certainly working on their dual, quad and tri core processors trying to get back some of Intel's 76% market share.

Either way - the practical side of things is that there is still comparatively few applications that take advantage of the multi-core features of our new processors. Windows for example has a habit of ignoring the extra power on-tap. Linux (which is natively multi-core) does fairly well.

Microsoft and AMD have both announced large funding for software development into this area to try to make a difference.

I would be interested to hear from people using multi-core's for specific applications - and any new Mac users that might be using this technology !