The launch of Intel Conroe is scheduled to go on July 23rd, when partners will start rolling out the new products. The NDA for reviews is scheduled to expire around July 28th. However, AMD has a counter-attack weapon hidden in its Socket AM2 infrastructure. It seems that all AM2 CPUs were outfitted with a support for Reverse-HyperThreading, an architectural change which enables software to think that it is working on a single-core alone. By combining two cores, the company has been able to produce the six IPC "core" that will go head to head against four IPC "core" from Conroe/Merom/WoodCrest combo.

Update: One source close to AMD said that he has not heard of any technology that could boost single-threaded applications performance on the dual-core chips by combining the resources of the two execution engines. Another one, polled by The Inquirer web-site, also said that the technology does not exist.

I'm suprised they never did this to begin with but perhaps it just took time. Very good news none the less. Intel may be onto a good thing with conroe but honestly, Intel could never be interesting to me unless they started selling 5ghz quadcore chips for the price of a 3500+ :)

miglaugh> This seems very interesting in theory... Lets just see if anything uses it and if it has a positive impact. I sure hope it works, I just don't see myself buying intel.

If it works as advertised, I'd say a 25-40% gain in performance (in single-threaded apps; probably most noticeable in games...

This seems very interesting in theory... Lets just see if anything uses it and if it has a positive impact. I sure hope it works, I just don't see myself buying intel.