As promised back in September, AMD announced on Thursday that it has started shipping its new Phenom processors with triple cores. These processors are the first on the market that use 3 cores on a single silicon die instead of the more traditional 2 or 4 core chips.

The design of the Phenom X3 8400 (2.1GHz) and Phenom X3 8600 (2.3GHZ) chips are essential the same as AMD’s quad cores with one of the cores removed. This configuration allows for new pricing of the chips in between dual cores and quad cores, where rival Intel does not currently have a competitive product.

Today Intel announced plans for its future in building processor chips in this seemingly crazy race to build them bigger and faster between Intel and AMD. The latest news involves new chips that promise to bump up processing speeds even more with 2, 4, 6 and even 8-core processors.

Intel unveiled a new microprocessor code-named “Dunnington” which will pack in a 6-core processor as a replacement for current Xeon systems with Quad-core processors. According to Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel’s digital enterprise group, the new Dunnington processors are expected to be available in the second half of 2008.

Intel made an announcement on Sunday that they’ve decided to give a new family of small processor chips the official name “Atom”. The Atom family of processors will be low-power chips targeting mobile devices that access the internet as well as lower-end, “Internet-centric” mobile computers. The first two chips to be branded with the Atom were previously code-named Silverthorne and Diamondville.

Both of these chips are expected to hit the market early yet this year. Intel’s Sliverthorne chip is designed to run in mobile Internet devices and uses very low amounts of power, even shutting down between processing tasks to further conserve power. The Diamondville chip is a more affordable single processing core chip created for low-end notebook computers.

On Sunday Intel launched new processors with smaller chips that go by the name Penryn that are produced with a 45 nanometer process which is significantly smaller than the 65 nanometer process used today. Intel announced plans for this launch earlier this fall which introduces such small circuitry thirty million of these 45nm-wide circuits could fit on the head of a pin.

There are multiple advantages to this smaller design. First, the smaller circuits allow Intel to create more chips using the same single platter of silicon making overall production more efficient and Intel is expecting as much as a 15 percent increase in processing speed with the new design. It also currently puts them undeniably in front of rival Advanced Micro Design in an ongoing head-to-head battle for the fastest and most efficient processors. AMD launched 65 nm chips earlier in the year as well as a triple core processor, and plans to also have 45nm chips in production by next year.

Intel announced today at the Intel Developer Forum in San Fancisco that the companies next generation of processors, code named “Penryn”, are slated to start hitting the streets November 12. This announcement continues to fuel the race between Intel and rival chip maker Advanced Micro Devices, who within the last week unveiled new quad-core and triple-core processors.

The new Penryn chips from Intel promise a 20 percent performance boost along with improved energy efficiencies over the current chips available. The new Penryn’s are able to achieve faster processing with less energy due to the companies new 45 nanometer manufacturing process, which creates ridiculously small circuitry that’s only 45 billionth of a meter wide. Thirty million of these circuits could fit on the head of a single pin. Moving ahead to the 45 nanometer production gives Intel an additional edge over AMD in the processor manufacturing race since both companies currently product chips using 65 nanometer construction.

Hot on the heals of the Barcelona Quad Core processor introduction last week, AMD today confirmed rumors and unveiled a new triple core addition to the Phenom lineup of dual-core and quad-core processors. The new triple core Phenom (code named “Toliman”) will be added in the first quarter of 2008 and will likely take its place in a new pricing tier between the dual and quad cores.

AMD says the new CPU’s will be the first ever to offer 3 cores on a single silicon die, even though the makeup of the new triple core will be essential the same as that of the quad-core, with one of the cores removed. The 3-core CPU’s will allow AMD to provide more purchasing options for consumers while still introducing multi-core technology into more computer purchases without requiring consumers to buy into the full quad-core price.

Today it’s AMD’s turn again to announce that it has the best of the best with what the company is calling the “World’s Most Advanced x86 Processor”, the Quad-Core AMD Opteron. To back up this claim AMD boasts a number of enhancements with the new processor, including more energy efficiency, better virtualization performance and offers “non-disruptive” transitions from dual-core to quad-core.

AMD also talked about additional improved energy efficiencies in today’s press release with things like AMD CoolCore Technology which powers down unused parts of the processor, Independent Dynamic Core Technology which allows each core to vary its only clock frequency, and Dual Dynamic Power Management which allows each core to regulate its only voltage depending on usage.

Intel unveiled six new chips today that raise the industry’s benchmark for how fast quad-core processors can run handling multi-processor servers. Translated from geek speak, these chips run amazingly fast but you don’t need them for your home PC. However, they will help the companies that handle your banking, phone service, cable provider and so on.

The sextet of Quad-Core Xeon 7300 series processors, dubbed Tigerton, deliver more than twice the performance and more than three times the performance per watt over Intel’s earlier generation of dual-core clips. The fastest model is the X7350 running at 2.93GHz, 8M bytes of shared on-chip cache and a thermal design power of 130 watts. The next fastest is the E7340 at 2.4 GHz and the same 8M cache followed by the E7330 at 2.4 GHz (6M cache). Next follows the E7320 and E7310 with both having 4M bytes of shared cache and pace along at processing speeds of 2.13GHz and 1.6GHz, respectively. Finally there is the L7345 at 1.86GHz and a 8M cache, designed exclusively for blade servers and high-density rack servers.

Intel has announced the first laptop CPU for the companies Extreme Edition of processors called the Core 2 Extreme X7800. The X7800 is a 2.6GHz processor with 4MB of L2 cache and an 800MHz front-side bus which all makes for great news to gamers who would like to get desktop-like gaming performance out of a mobile computer. In addition, this new high-end mobile chip will have nothing to stop you from overclocking it, at your own risk of course.

Notebooks utilizing Intel’s latest Santa Rosa upgrade to the Centrino platform recently launched on computers from Dell, HP and Gateway many other manufacturers.

“When we introduced Intel Centrino 4 years ago, Intel changed the computing landscape with our mobile innovations,” said Intel vice president Mooly Eden. “Now, simply said, we have improved virtually all aspects of Intel-based notebooks, the most popular and fastest growing computing market segment in the world.”

The new “Santa Rosa” promises to add less power consumption and in turn a longer battery life for you notebook without sacrificing speed. The Centrino Duo name will not change for consumers looking for the chip, but this upgrade will bring faster processing, support for 802.11n WiFi and something called Turbo Memory which utilizes NAND Flash memory in conjunction with the hard drive to shorten booting times due faster reads.

For business …

Today Intel announced a new addition to its quad-core processor family with the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800.

The Core 2 Extreme delivers the fastest clock speed ever reached for Intel in a quad-core desktop. While this is good news for really any type of processor intensive applications, where it really gets the most notice is from the gamers. Intel mentioned some games that are already built utilizing the quad-core functionality to improve gaming performance, such as Crysis, Supreme Commander and Hellgate London. Intel stated that these games have ‘undergone substantial joint engineering efforts with Intel to use more than two processing threads to their advantage,’.This new quad-core runs at 2.93 GHz with an 8MB cache and supporting 1066 MHz system bus.

This announcement from Intel follows a number of new releases from the chip-maker as it keeps up its …

Apple has uncovered the specs behind its two new Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro and they’re drool worthy. The company is offering two models, an 8-core or quad-core one, and at different processing speeds.

The higher end 8-core unit consists of two Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Clovertown” processors and has a processor clocking in at 3.0 GHz while the two Dual-Core Intel Xeon “Woodcrest” processors model comes in three processing speeds, 2.0 GHz, 2.66 GHz and 3.0 GHz. Apple claims that the latter speed demon runs up to two times faster than the Power Mac G5 Quad already on the market.

Customers have the option of selecting from three different graphics card options (NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500, a ATI Radeon X1900 XT or a NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT). You can slide in up to four hard drives offering a healthy 3 TB of disc …

As chip design companies, Intel and AMD are locked in a seemingly never-ending race to outperform the other, with every little technological advantage that they can wring out of their designs trickling down to the bottom line and how much money they stand to make.

However, it looks like Intel just took the lead with today’s announcement that it is now selling more energy-efficient quad-core microprocessors. For companies that have data centers, the annual power savings could be significant if they used the power wise chips. Intel says that its new Xeon L5320 (1.86 GHz) and L5310 (1.60 HGz) quads consume just 12.5 watts of juice, a reduction of between 35 percent and almost 60 percent less electricity needed for the older models. At bulk orders of 1,000 units the cost of the L5320 is $519 while the L5310 …

AMD announced Wednesday the first chipset from the company that combines AMD’s technology with ATI’s in the ATI Radeon X1250 GPU.

By combining the Radeon graphics processing with AMD’s 690 chipset they eliminate the need for a separate graphics card. “With its leading image quality and 3D graphics capabilities, the AMD 690 series chipset is a proven performer, easily handling the demanding workloads of today’s PC users,” said Phil Eisler, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Chipset Division in a press release Wednesday. “This is just the first in a line of innovative, high- performance AMD chipsets that we’ll introduce to address every sector of the market.”

The new integrated 690 chipset is said to provide an excellent viewing experience with operating systems such as the new Windows Vista making Windows Flip and Windows Flip 3D an common part …

AMD has recently released two new Athlon processors to the market with opposite goals in mind for each. The AMD Athlon 64 single-core processors (3500+ and 3800+) have been designed to target the energy conscious at a 45-watt power consumption, giving an efficient solution for per-watt performance. The AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 dual-core processor 6000+ is directed at the opposite purpose, delivering high performance with a lower concern for excessive power consumption.

“Our relentless focus on customer-centric innovation and industry leadership in performance-per-watt enables AMD to offer the market new energy-efficient AMD Athlon 64 processors. We expect that our commercial and consumer customers, as well as end-users, will be pleased with both the low noise and small form factor designs possible using this latest generation of energy-efficient desktop processors,” said Bob Brewer, corporate vice president, Desktop …