For his part, Brookwood said, the multicore era is at its earliest stages. "We are not running into walls there."

That said, though, there's no definite word on how the industry will get there. Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. have taken different paths to their quad-core designs. Some analysts believe, though, that ultimately AMD might have to take a more Intel-like approach to really catch up, and then pass Intel, in the multicore market. (See related story: "")

Multicore history

Microprocessor makers turned to multicore designs to solve some fundamental problems. Semiconductor technology continues along the path defined by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965. Moore's Law says that the number of transistors on a given chip will double roughly every two years. But the heat generated by packing so much in one tiny space has demanded a new approach to achieving incremental performance gains.

The biannual Moore's Law increase comes at the same time the width of transistor lines within a chip shrinks. This allows more transistors to be placed inside a given chip area. Today, leading semiconductor vendors are producing chips at either 90- or 65-nanometer line widths, and the move to 45 nm will begin by some vendors later this year.