Digital Home Thoughts: AMD To Demonstrate Dual-Core Chips

"Aiming to deflate archrival Intel, Advanced Micro Devices this week will show off its dual-core chips, which will start to trickle out toward the middle of next year. AMD on Tuesday will show off a Hewlett-Packard ProLiant server with four dual-core Opteron chips at a facility in Austin, Texas, bringing the functional number of chips in four-processor servers to eight. "When you load Microsoft (Server 2003), it shows up as eight processors," said Marty Seyer, vice president and general manager of the microprocessor business unit at AMD."

You haven't really rendered video or audio until you've seen it fly with multi-processor rendering. It's makes a huge difference, but we'll need to see many applications re-coded to take advantage of SMP (Symmetrical Multi-Processing). Although after reading up on SMP a bit more, I'm wondering - will these multi-core processors to symmetrical processing, or asymmetrical processing? Current hyper-threading processors do symmetrical processing as far as I can tell (any of you computer science majors want to help me out?) I wonder if it would make more sense for Microsoft to develop an SMP layer that would allow software to take advantage of more than one CPU without requiring a code re-write?

At any rate, it's great to see AMD taking the lead here - hopefully it will spur Intel to move faster, and as consumers we'll have access to multi-processor based machines even sooner.