You thought six cores were nifty? This week, AMD and Intel have begun the multithreaded battle in earnest -- if only on the IT front -- with chips that have up to double that core density. This week, AMD has officially brought us that Opteron 6000 series leaked last week, a set of 8- and 12-core processors aimed at dual- and quad-CPU servers that it claims have both higher performance and lower cost than Intel's recent hex-core offerings. Not to be outdone, Intel has just introduced a 8-core processor series of its own, the Xeon 7500, that it envisions deployed in mammoth 256-processor configurations. In
