Intel Yorkfield vs AMD Altair - the upcoming quad-core battle

Yorkfield Extreme Edition based on the 45nm Penry core architecture will meet heads-on with AMD Altair based on the 65nm K8L core in Q3 2007. Both are quad core offerings but AMD touted theirs to be a native quad-core with dedicated 512KB L2 cache for each core and an additional 2MB L3 cache for the 4 cores to share. Intel has different plans for Yorkfield. Instead of sharing L2 cache for all the cores, the L2 cache size is further increased. Due to its advanced 45nm process technology, Yorkfield XE is able to pack a total of 12MB L2 cache (2 x 6MB L2) and still achieving a much smaller die size. The clock speed is significantly higher at 3.46-3.74GHz too.