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You may be focused on the home user market. On the server and workstation side the multi core systems allow double (or quad) the number of active processes to run nearly as fast. This is huge.

Putting it back on topic, AMD's approach to multi core is technically better than Intel's but Intel was smarter in that they hacked together an inferior quad core to beat AMD to market.


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Sounds like you're thinking of multi-processor not the new multi-core stuff like Cell. But maybe not. For the record, multi-processor is sort of the old way, where you have several large full processors with reorder buffers and their own caches and you hook them together in various ways. AMD had a very cool system for that which was good for servers. Multi-core is the new thing in which you take one processor with only one L2 cache and one memory controller and you stick a ton of simple in-order cores on it (each with its own L1).

I had a dream in which I dreamed this : "Intel has a future multi-core chip for the home PC which is similar to Cell and supposedly very awesome".

However, I just don't see high-end CPU's like that really commanding the huge premiums that they did in the past. I agree with a previous poster who said CPU's are becoming commodities like memory chips which means the profit margins will fall and it will become a tougher and tougher business. I don't like Intel or AMD as a long term buy & hold stock. Also it seems like IBM may become a bigger player in the processor market.

In the short term - the market is really really dumb about technology companies, whenever somebody makes a big announcement the stocks go nuts. So as others have said you can definitely make money playing these things in the short term.