Advanced Micro Devices is going to fire back at Intel today in the enthusiast PC market. The Sunnyvale company will unveil a new socket for high-end computers today that will allow it to put two dual-core microprocessors side by side in a PC. The new 4x4 socket will help it compete for the speed crown with Intel, which is poised to launch its new Conroe desktop microprocessors in July.
"This is something we have worked on for a while based on customer feedback," said Brent Barry, director of brand marketing for AMD"s FX series of gamer chips.
It"s like Gillette adding four razor blades to its razors now. How many is enough? It could get confusing for gamers. But the techies will sort it out, much the same way they have with the Nvidia SLI and ATI Crossfire dual graphics cards: more is better.
While Intel"s Conroe chips will allegedly take the performance crown from AMD"s own dual-core FX series of microprocessors, AMD can claim leadership in terms of putting four cores into a single PC, allowing for more tasks to be done in parallel. Patrick Moorhead, vice president of global channel marketing, said the new socket would ship in the second half of 2006 and target the high-end gamer segment, which usually means high-priced.