Intel Corp (INTC)

[Elmer Phud]

Smooth

Last week, AMD showed off a working quad-core processor at an event in San Francisco. The company had promised a quad-core demo by the end of the year, and they did manage to deliver, even if all the audience saw was a Windows machine running task manager. Clearly, the silicon for their next-generation core microarchitecture, codenamed Barcelona (also popularly called "K8L"), has a few kinks left to be worked out.

This makes me start thinking. If AMD had until the end of the year to show a Demo and still meet their commit, why show off a handicapped one a month early? Clearly the functionality was very limited to say the least. Could it be that the existing problems require a full mask revision and there won't be a new stepping until next year anyway?

Just a thought...