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Dual-Core processing hits the laptop
world!
The latest buzz in the processor industry is about
dual core processor. AMD may be the first to take the limelight with
their announcement of dual core AMD Opteron dual core processor
set to launch in mid-2005 but Intel and IBM are cueing
up their dual core processors as well.
A dual core processor is
exactly what it sounds like. It is two processor cores on one die essentially
like having a dual processor system in one processor. AMD's Opteron
processor has been dual processor capable since its inception. Opteron dual
core processor was designed with an extra HyperTransport link. The relevance
of it was mostly overlooked. HyperTransport Technology simply means a faster
connection that is able to transfer more data between two chips. This does not
mean that the chip itself is faster. It means that the capability exists via the
HyperTransport pathway for one chip to “talk” to another chip or device at a
faster speed and with greater data throughput.
News on Intel's Dual-Core
Notebook Chip.
Yonah, a notebook chip coming from
Intel in the first part of next year, is going to be a lot different than its
predecessors, company executives say.
The chip, which will be made on the
65nm process, will come with a number of enhancements over the current Pentium M
line of notebook chips, Mooly Eden, vice-president of the mobility group, said
at a briefing in San Francisco.
For one thing, it will contain two
cores, instead of the single core on current notebook chips. The two separate
cores will also share a 2MB cache. Current dual-core desktop chips from AMD and
Intel come with similar sized caches, but each core accesses only 1MB of cache
memory dedicated to it. Sharing the cache will significantly boost performance.
(The chips communicate with the cache through a single bus embedded in the
chip.)
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