Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Forget quad-core, AMD is preparing a dodeca-core chip. If you didn’t stay in boarding school if you need refreshing with your greek vocabulary, dodeca means 12, and that’s 12 cores for you right there. Imagine, a dozen times faster than a normal chip. But how fast does one’s computer ever really need to be? AMD doesn’t seem to care if there’s an answer to that question or not (just as its closest competitor Intel doesn’t), and moves on with their plan to produce a 12-core processor to be released by late 2008. It will reportedly be called the Shanghai, and will be a 45nm successor to their not-so-successful Barcelona chip.

The AMD Shanghai will supposedly come with HyperTransport 3.0 and six cores so it can stand up against Intel’s upcoming Dunnington chips in a race towards becoming the fastest processors on Earth. And while the six-core variety of the Shanghai isn’t even close to coming to market, AMD already has plans for a follow-up: a 12-core version, called Istanbul, packing 12 cores (what else?) and HyperTransport 3.0 interconnect as well.

Get that? The first version of this product is already 3.0 while some companies can’t even get 2.0 right. That’s what they meant with all the numbers, right?

Read [Daily Tech] Via [Engadget]