Quad Core Chips From Intel and AMD

lubricated writes "According to the San Fransisco Chronicle, in an effort to one-up AMD, Intel will be coming out with 4 core cpu's in 2007." From the article: "Chips with two cores have been the latest rage, with both Intel and AMD selling those microprocessors as their high-end offering. Apple Computer Inc.'s new iMac, which started selling last month, uses the dual-core chip ... Not to be outdone, Randy Allen, AMD's corporate vice president of server and workstation division, said Friday that his firm is working its own quad-core processor for release next year."

Comments

Re:When will Microsoft change its license?

[cyberjessy]

This is silly. Microsoft made a conscious decision to license software per CPU (or per Slot) rather than core, and they had announced that they are doing so because multi-core looked like the natural way in which CPUs will improve, given that the Mhz war has ended. In fact they were the first major company to do so.

Also, this does not really eat into MS bottom line compared to Oracle or IBM. Most of MS revenue comes from the the desktop, while they are just competing in servers. Sql Server suddenly becomes more attractive, given Oracles complicated multi-core policy. (Remember that Oracle earlier announced that every core is a CPU, its just recently that they realized it will be a disaster and modified their original plans.)

Earlier CPU speeds doubled every 18 months. Multi-core will simply take another approach to achieving the same. I am not sure how this will hurt software companies any more than increasing cycles/sec.