Digital Home Thoughts: AMD's Socket G34 CPUs Will Rock 12 Cores

"AMD's 12-core and 8-core processors get a new home in 2010. AMD's newest roadmap reveals a major shift in early 2010: the company will once again overhaul its socket architecture to make way for DDR3 support. The new socket, dubbed G34, will also ship with two new second-generation 45nm processors. The first of these processors, 8-core Sao Paolo, is described as a "twin native-quadcore Shanghai processor" by one AMD engineer. Shanghai, expected to ship late this year, is AMD's first 45nm shrink of the ill-fated Barcelona processor."

12 cores? I say bring it on, but I sure hope that software developers get their butt in gear and make their programs work smartly with multiple cores - my article on this subject showed that right now very few programs can use even four cores, so having 12 cores and watching my video editing program use two of them would be depressing. One would hope though that by 2010 software developers will have clued in to the fact that multi-core computing is here to stay...