The folks at X86-secret.com claim to have received word from an AMD engineer about some of the company's plans for its post-K8 CPU architecture. Reportedly, AMD has a hardware threading implementation in the works, which would work as a "reverse Hyper-Threading" of sorts.

Whereas Intel's Hyper-Threading allows Netburst-based processors to emulate two CPU cores on a single physical processor, AMD's technology would allow multiple physical CPU cores to emulate a single logical processor. This approach could make sense because increasing numbers of physical cores in future CPUs may offer diminishing gains as software becomes harder to parallelize efficiently. X86-secret says Intel is working on a similar implementation, too, and that it has "presented its vision for hardware threading many times over." (thanks TechReport)