Six-core consumer chips coming soon
Both major chipmakers, Intel and AMD, are working on six-core chips for the consumer market. It could make for an interesting case study into whether technology development is led by demand or potential.
Intel has confirmed it’s working on a chip named Gulftown, a consumer edition of its existing Westermere chip, while a separate report pegs a May release for AMD’s Thuban chip. Unlike Thuban, Gulftown will not include a graphics controller, the logic being that the type of people who’ll buy it will already have a separate graphics device.
Whether many home users will want a six-core chip enough to make them marketable at a premium price is questionable. The problem of overheating means they may be a tough sell for laptops and netbooks, while it’s arguable only hardcore gamers and those who carry out a lot of video editing will make much practical use of the added capabilities.
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February 4th, 2010
Even games will be hard-pressed to take advantage of six cores, as most are only optimized for 2, some 4. An application would need to be scalable to fully take advantage all the different core configurations out now.