AMD promises 8 and 12 core chips

Changes for servers first then for desktop computing

22 July 2008 9:36 GMT / By Katie Scott

AMD is promising a new processor socket in 2010 as well as revealing plans for eight and 12 core chips.

The new DDR3-compatible socket are likely to be eight core chips – a second revision of 45nm process architecture, says PC Plus.

The eight core chip, which has been given the codename Sao Paulo will consist of the two quad-core die in a single package.

The 12 core chip will follow.

The first generation of AMD 45nm products will also arrive late this year, and are apparently codenamed Shanghai.

AMD has been jointly developing these quad-core processors with IBM and is manufacturing them in Dresden, Germany where AMD has a large plant.

The new socket, G34, has 1974 pins according to DailyTech, which is 767 more pins than AMD's current Socket F+ for server chips.

Other information about the new chips suggests 12MB of L3 cache and 512KB of L2 cache will be provided per core.