The German site is sometimes days ahead. They had the #9 update several days before. The AMD system is just pulling farther ahead and the X2 is going to be a great seller. Now that AMD has split off the memory division, they should show a good proffit for ther CPU division. I think they should split off the Geode too as I do not think it will ever make them money. Heck they could take a Semperon and run it at say 1Ghz full load and 200Mhz idle. It could do .8 and .5v respectively. I know my Athlon64 3500+ Winchester core runs at like 10w idle at 1.1v and 1Ghz with Cool and Quiet and tops out around 35w or so at the full 1.4v and 2.2Ghz. I also know this thing at 1Ghz can handle playing a DVD and still run at about 5% load. It could likely handle almost any games too at 1Ghz.
There is also a nice rumor (that Anand is even looking at) that puts a DX9 LongHorn capable integrated graphics and I/O controller on chip sometime next year. Think of a 65nm dual cored Athlon64 X2 with a cut down x300 core with one pipeline. You'd think it would be slow, but think of it linked to a dual channel DDR2 667-800Mhz and a core running at 2Ghz or faster. Now think that it would only add about 20% or so to the die surface making it a cheap add-on. Now think of how little it would increase the power on this chip and how much power it would save by removing the north and south bridge. Now also thing of the reduction in size on boards for SFF computerss and laptops. Also think of the reduction in costs to make the boards. Even 1 pipeline at 2Ghz would be fast....
Now I know it would likely not be an ATI or nVidia graphics core, but I know VIA is really down on its luch and SiS and ULi are not doing so well either. They all have some sort of DX9 graphics either out or coming out and they do not perform too well. Even discrete cards cant keep up with an x300 SE or 620 TC card, but think now of taking that core and running it at 4-5 times the speed. Think also of increasing the memory bandwith the same or more. No it would not beat an x700Pro or 6600GT, but it might come close to say a x600Pro and 5700U. Now think that this would likely save $20-50 of the chipset and motherboard costs and would liekly only increase the cost of the CPU by $10. Also figure this would be a reduction of power for the chipset of likely 20-30w. In a Thin and Light market it might actually draw less power than a Yonah as the chiposets right now kill the Turion's battery performance. This would also be a great server chip and perfect for blades. For the full sized desktop it might not help much, but if you can use a PCI-e x16 card and this then you still might be able to make good use of it to drive a second or third monitor.
The other rumor that I am kind of interested in is AMD might add co-proccessors again to some of their chips in 2007. The cool thing is they are already looking at PCI-e 2, DDR3, HT-2 bus and quad cores. Now think of adding a dedicated tiny special purpose logic unit. It could either been an SSE4 unit to help boost HD-DVD decoding speeds or there is also talk that it could a a logic unit to help split tasks between the cores including non-threaded applications. That would be VERY mighty. Instead of being like a Cell chip with one big core splitting the load to 8 smaller ones, it would be one small one splitting the load between 4 larger ones... 4 2+Ghz cores with 1MB L1 cache with what nine exicution units. The Cell cores are likely going to be clocked faster at 3.2Ghz with only have 256k of cache and only 2 exicution units.
Intel is not sitting still either, but their only cool core looks to be a quad cored P-M with an integrated memory controller and a 4MB shared L2 cache. This is going to be a XEON chip actually and might use a but based on an advanced Itanium2 bus (and possibly use the same actual boards). Nothing else Intel has coming up looks even close.
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