It looks like AMDs strategy against Intels Core 2 Duo is getting clearer. Just like Intel the Athlon 64 will get a shared Cache for 2 (or 4) cores, but AMD won't use the L2 cache for this, they will add a L3 cache with 2 MB or more. Regarding Intels quad core Kentsfield, AMD might even have an advantage here: While the Kentsfield uses two Conroe cores and therefore two cores will share their L2 cache, the AMD quad cores will share the L3 cache between all four cores.

And, like the Conroe, AMD will add 128 bit wide processing for SSE calls - oh, pardon: make that two!

More details can be found at www.au-ja.de