This CNet News.com story reports that PC processor company AMD has revealed its plans for its chip architecture for 2007 and that it will not be making major changes in its design in an effort to boost overall performance:

Chips built under the new AMD architecture will feature a faster version of HyperTransport, an input-output technology featured on AMD chips. HyperTransport 3.0, recently approved by the standards body that governs the development of the technology, will accomplish 5.2 gigatransfers (5.2 billion transfers of data) per second, Moore said. Although it doesn't get as much attention as 64-bit processing, HyperTransport is behind much of the performance gains of AMD chips in recent years.

The new chips will also sport four processing cores. AMD's best chips currently come with two processing cores. One of the biggest changes will come in the caches, reservoirs of memory built into the processor for rapid data access. In current AMD chips, each core has two caches and those caches are completely dedicated to their respective cores. In future chips, each core will also have two dedicated caches, but the cores will also share a third cache. With the third cache, the processor will less often have to fetch data from main memory--a time-consuming process.