== Domination of Two Semiconductor Giants Intel and AMD In Multi-core Processor Development ==

=== Early Product Launches ===

The next month May 2005, AMD released Athlon 64 X2 which was the first dual core desktop processor series and Turion processor which were designed for low power consumption mobile processor segments. AMD was intending for the Turion to compete against Intel’s mobile processors, initially the Pentinum M and later the Intel Core and Intel Core 2 processors.

Intel released Core series was also the first Intel processor used as the main CPU in an Apple Macintosh computer on January 2006. The Core Duo was the CPU for the first-generation MacBook Pro, while the Core Solo appeared in Apple's Mac Mini line. Core Duo signified the beginning of Apple's shift to Intel processors across the entire Mac line. The successor to Core is the mobile version of the Intel Core 2 line of processors using cores based upon the Intel Core microarchitecture, released on July 27, 2006. The release of the mobile version of Intel Core 2 marked the reunification of Intel's desktop and mobile product lines as Core 2 processors were released for desktops and notebooks. The Core 2 architecture hit a wide range of devices, but Intel needed to produce something less expensive for the ultra-low-budget and portable markets. This led to the creation of Intel's Atom between 2008 and 2009, which used a 26mm2 die, less than one-fourth the size of the first Core 2 dies.

Meanwhile, AMD launched Phenom dual-, triple- and quad-core versions to target a budget desktop processor market. AMD considered the quad core Phenoms to be the first "true" quad core design, as these processors were a monolithic multi-core design meaning all cores on the same silicon die, unlike Intel's Core 2 Quad series which were a multi-chip module (MCM) design. The processors were on the Socket AM2+ platform.

Microsoft and Intel announced to invest $20 million in Parallel Computing Research over the next 5 years on March 8 2008. University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) were part of the research. The dual and quad core multiprocessor was increasingly becoming common at the time and the giant tech corporations wanted to support the parallel computing researchers who were developing better ways of writing applications that could take advantage of multicore processors.

=== AMD vs Intel in 2010s ===

Intel continued to grow its market share with the tick-tock improvement cycle of its Core series of microprocessors since the 2006 release of Core microarchitecture and continuing for the next ten years. Thus, AMD has been almost completely absent for many years due to AMD’s primary competitor Intel. However, AMD officially announced a new series of processors, named "Ryzen", during its New Horizon summit on December 13, 2016 and introduced Ryzen 1000 series processors in February 2017, featuring up to 8 cores and 16 threads, which launched on March 2, 2017. Ryzen was released as the return of AMD to the high-end CPU market, offering a product stack able to compete with Intel at every level. Having more processing cores, Ryzen processors offer greater multi-threaded performance at the same price point relative to Intel's Core processors. Since the release of Ryzen, AMD's CPU market share has increased while Intel appears to have stagnated.

=== Multi-core Processor Today ===

Today, multicore processor makers including AMD and Intel have been continuously improving their processors to satisfy the high demand of consumers. As of today(November, 2020), Intel and AMD both made announcements to release newer version of its core brand; 11th Gen Intel Core processors with Intel Iris Xe graphics and Ryzen 5000 Series desktop processor lineup powered by the new “Zen 3” architecture respectively.

=== AMD vs Intel with OpneMP ===

Comparison of OpenMP performance using AMD and Intel multicore processors was conducted in Telcom University in 2018. This study simulated breaking waves by using Navier-Stokes equation which was parallelized with OpenMP. The below table shows the specifications of AMD and Intel multicore processors used to perform the comparison.

According to the execution time in serial and parallel, the execution time of the Intel processor is far better than the AMD one. The Intel processor only needs half the time the AMD processor needed to run the simulation. However, the speedup and efficiency of the AMD processor was slightly higher than the Intel processor in general.

Note that the execution time using Intel is observed higher than AMD, since from the first table,cache size of Intel is given as larger than AMD. The size of cache in Intel is proportional to the size of the total particles in simulation, thus high speed of memory interaction is obtained.

== References ==