AMD's multi-core approach was right from start, Intel's not

Nathan Brookwood, a well known chip analysts, send a note to his clients that in the future multi-cores will be used by chip firms to market their products.

Until a few years ago Intel said clock speeds were going to reach 10GHz by the end of this decade but now they are talking more and more about processors with tents and perhaps hundreds of cores within ten years.

Brookwood said that Intel's first foray into dual core designs have weak performance because of the need for that architecture to share one front side bus connecting both to the north bridge.

However, he said, Intel engineers in Israel got it right with Yonah by sharing cache and system interface functions across both cores. He said Insight 64 regards front side bus interfaces as an "archaic" design concept. But, he said, Yonah's approach "makes the best of a bad situation".

He reckons that Intel's Clovertown quad core will consist of two Woodcrests crammed into a single package. "We've seen that movie before, and it didn't have a happy ending then, either," he said.

Read more over at The Inquirer.