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.