If your CPU has only a single
core, it's officially a
dinosaur. In fact, quad-core
computing is now
commonplace; you can even
get laptop computers with
four cores today. But we're
really just at the beginning of
the core wars: Leadership in
the CPU market will soon be
decided by who has the most
cores, not who has the
fastest clock speed.
What is it? With the
gigahertz race largely
abandoned, both AMD and
Intel are trying to pack more
cores onto a die in order to
continue to improve
processing power and aid
with multitasking operations. Miniaturizing chips further
will be key to fitting these cores and other components
into a limited space. Intel will roll out 32-nanometer
processors (down from today's 45nm chips) in 2009.
When is it coming? Intel has been very good about
sticking to its road map. A six-core CPU based on the
Itanium design should be out imminently, when Intel
then shifts focus to a brand-new architecture called
Nehalem, to be marketed as Core i7. Core i7 will
feature up to eight cores, with eight-core systems
available in 2009 or 2010. (And an eight-core AMD
project called Montreal is reportedly on tap for 2009.)
After that, the timeline gets fuzzy. Intel reportedly
canceled a 32-core project called Keifer, slated for
2010, possibly because of its complexity (the company
won't confirm this, though). That many cores requires a
new way of dealing with memory; apparently you can't
have 32 brains pulling out of one central pool of RAM.
But we still expect cores to proliferate when the kinks
are ironed out: 16 cores by 2011 or 2012 is plausible
(when transistors are predicted to drop again in size to
22nm), with 32 cores by 2013 or 2014 easily within
reach. Intel says "hundreds" of cores may come even
farther down the line.
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