One of the reasons that might have pushed Intel to speed up the release of its six cores Xeon was most likely the forthcoming race with AMD, and the aim to be the first one to introduce such multicores CPU on the market for early 2010.Indeed, AMD does not plan to let Santa Clara's Giant to define the rules of the game alone and will launch in March a CPU featuring 12 cores and dedicated to servers. The maximal frequency of such Opteron will be around 2.4 GHz, allowing a comfortable TDP of 140 W. So, AMD will release them not so far after the first six cores Xeon from Intel, both CPU targeting similar market niches, servers and workstation.If there is currently no chance that AMD CPUs end in a Mac, nevertheless there is always a good point of having competition as it will force Intel to keep innovating while reducing prices of its CPU, and potentially prices of our Macs.
