14 DAY TRIAL // AMD and Intel have both published technical data concerning their future to be launched processors. One can easily get a grasp of what their plans are by analyzing the SPECint_rate2006 and SPECfp_rate2006 benchmarks regarding the performance of their quad-core processing units.
Although these processors haven't yet been released on the market, their specifications and difference in performance come out by paying attention to the presentations and benchmarks results Intel and AMD have released to the public. For all the curious ones out there, these can be found here, here and here.
As X-bit Labs have said, and according to Intel, there is a significant difference in performance between a system with a pair of quad-core AMD Opteron processors working at 2.5 GHz and one that comes equipped with two 3.2 GHz Intel quad-core Xeon's from the 5400 series.
But this shouldn't be very important for those people who want more performance on their computers because, as far as we know at the moment, Intel doesn't plan to release on the market the 3.2 GHz Xeons, whilst AMD will more than probably have their Opteron 2360 SE in stores in December.
That means they have the time to prepare a processor to take on Intel's Xeon 3.2 GHz 5400 series and cash-in in the meantime by delivering the end user with their own quad-core processing solution, the Opteron 2360 SE.
Even more, while Intel is cooking up the 5400 Intel Xeon release for the next year, AMD has mentioned some of their plans for the next few years. While Intel wants to focus its attention on processors with as much cores as possible, AMD has declared they will try another approach, which they've named "APU" (Accelerated Processing Units) that will include not only processor cores but also cores dedicated to other tasks.
At the moment, Fusion (their processor with CPU and graphic cores) is the next best thing to the processing solution AMD prepares for us in the years to come. From this first step AMD could easily put in even more cores, all with their own specialized role, coming up with processing units capable of integrating everything the end user may desire: cores that take care of the game physics, of the video/audio encoding and decoding or any other exotic use you may think of.
Therefore you should expect processors with as many cores as you may imagine coming from Intel and, almost the same thing coming from AMD, but with a twist: they're going to stick to their future X-core processors specialized cores that will ease up the work of the central processing unit.
Only time will tell which approach is the best one.