by Rob Enderle
This week the core wars got started with AMD launching a new Opteron part with a whopping 12 cores that, amazingly enough, fit into the same thermal envelope (meaning it’s as cool as) its prior four-core offering. This led Arthur Cole to ask “Are We Ready for a Multicore Universe?” Intel responded the following day with an eight-core part with hyperthreading (16 virtual cores) that fit in the same thermal envelope as its old four-core offering. It, for once, targeted Itanium loads and was designed to take SPARC out.

The products are well-differentiated from each other in that for dedicated loads, 12 real cores trump 16 virtual ones. But where massive threading is required, virtual cores are just fine. It will really depend on how the OEMs position their solutions. Both products will find unique homes in the high-performance computer space. This will get even more interesting when AMD rolls out Fusion next year, blurring the line as to what we even call a “core” as CPU and GPU computing collide and the number of cores goes vertical.

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