AMD tells analysts it will ship quad core processors in 2007According to the Inq, AMD informed analysts that it will ship quad core processors by 2007. IDG News suggests that the new processors will use an improved Hypertransport that will use DDR signaling to double the bandwidth of the Hypertransport channels.
Four core processors, combined with Newisys' Horus chipset that supports up to 32 processors would allow for servers with up to 128 cores!
The four core processors will apparently interface to DDR3 memory which is currently used for GPU's but may be mainstream by 2007.
DDR3 is available at up to 1400MHz data rate we can expect dual channel DDR3 to exceed 22.4GB/sec - and I for one would not be surprised if by 2007 it exceeded 30GB/sec. With a quad core processor, AMD might want to consider going to a quad channel memory architecture - which could lead to a whopping 40-60GB/sec memory bandwidth; and there is no reason why they could not put an additional external memory controller on a Hypertransport 3 channel allowing for even greater maximum memory bandwidth!
The next few years should be quite interesting...
