Quad-core wars - Yorkfield vs Altair

[Andreas G]

Intel will get a headstart in the quad-core segment through its Kentsfield and Clovertown processors for the desktop and server market. The coming year or so the battle will eventually heat up quite a lot as AMD is planning to launch a quad-core architecture of its own; Barcelona. The first processor using this architecture has been codenamed Altair and we've already been able to supply you with some detailed information about this quad-core processor. With the help of 65nm technology AMD has managed to fit 4 processor cores with 512KB L2 cache each and shared L3 cache at 2MB in the same processor. The frequencies will be up to par with the processor of today from AMD; up to 3.0GHz.

Also Yorkfield has appeared among the news, but here the details have been a lot fewer. VR-Zone has now published some more juicy details and compared these two processors that are expected to be launched at approximately the same time.

It's pretty clear that Intel will have come a good way with its architecture when its time for Yorkfield as it will use Intel's 45nm Penry core. This will happen just six months after that AMD launches its first 65nm processor. The four cores of Yorkfield will be flanked by 12MB L2 cache (2x6MB) and the frequencies will be about 3.46GHz to 3.74GHz, which is nothing but imressive for a quad-core processor. With new SSE4 instructions and support for DDR3-1333 memory Yorkfield looks quite powerful and AMD's Altair will have it's hands full with keeping up to Intel's new flagship, from what it seems at least. Without knowing all too much about the performance it actually looks like Intel has a good grip of the situation, even if we look far ahead.

Picture from VR-Zone