What's AMD up to? “Reverse Multi-threading”, apparently, though I guess you could also call it “Superthreading”. AMD is developing the new technology that moves in the opposite direction of the minds and desires of many developers, who opt for parallel computing. In AMD's pursuit, multiple cores on a chip will operate as a single core, and appear as such to the operating system. The net result is that a single thread is being executed by two cores at once, with different cores taking on different portions of the thread. The current way software is developed doesn't encourage this, and it appears that AMD is largely looking for a hardware solution that will step in and handle this.

This might be a good thing, but the way the market looks now it appears to be a step backwards. More and more software is being written multithreaded to take advantage of multiple processors in a single system. Then again, AMD may factor this in and be designing the new technology to be more efficient with multiple threads. Either way you look at it, AMD seems to be taking a risk here, and sometimes risks produce great things.