CPU roadmap: 2007 and beyond

The multicore era is upon us

Megahertz will take you only so far. Desktop processors topped the 1GHz mark in 2000, 2GHz in 2001, and 3GHz in 2002. Nearly five years later, we've yet to see a chip leave the factory clocked at 4GHz. Power demands and heat concerns meant that AMD and Intel couldn't simply keep ramping up clock speeds with each new CPU generation without running into design obstacles with desktops and, especially, with notebooks.

Having come to the end of the megahertz rope, Intel and AMD looked to other methods for increasing processing power while maintaining or improving efficiency, the most significant of which was increasing the number of processing cores on a CPU. The multicore era began in spring 2005 with Intel's Pentium D 800 dual-core chips, and AMD soon followed with the Athlon 64 X2 chips. AMD dominated the initial round of head-to-head benchmarks, and Intel's subsequent Pentium D 900 series, released in the autumn of 2005, did little to dampen the enthusiasm for AMD's X2 line.

AMD's run was short-lived as Intel sped back into the lead last year. Intel released the first dual-core mobile chip with Core Duo in January 2006, which brought about huge advances in notebook performance. Following that success, its Core 2 Duo launch in the summer of 2006 — for both desktops (Conroe) and notebooks (Merom) — can arguably be called the most successful product launch in the company's history. AMD is still reeling.

What sort of response is AMD readying to combat the runaway hit that is Core 2 Duo? What advances does Intel have in store later this year and next? How will each company expand on its nascent quad-core technology? We'll answer these questions and more as we explore Intel's and AMD's roadmaps, both the officially announced technologies around the corner and the rumours of those still lurking over the horizon.