AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) previewed its roadmap that shows the company's future plans. Scheduled for the next years are quad-core processors, reminded in recent news, and AMD64 instruction extensions.

AMD's processors are expected to feature the HyperTransport 3.0 bus, a faster version of the current HyperTransport 2.0. A short term plan is stated to be the dual channel DDR2 memory support, virtualization and advanced thermal management, which will surface in 2006.

The AMD64 instruction extensions that will come starting 2007 will provide higher performance, continuing the evolution of the x86 architecture.

Beginning in 2007, AMD planned multi core server processors that will support level three cache (L3 Cache), a memory that operates faster than the system memory, but evidently slower than level two cache (L2 Cache). The L2 cache has not been used in AMD processors since 1999 and AMD K6-III chip. Moreover, server processors from AMD are expected to gain FB-DIMM support.

As for the quad core chips, it is unclear which manufacturing technology will be used to make them, but it is likely to be the 65 nm (nanometer) process.