There's an interview with an Intel rep up over at Digitimes. Boyd Davis works in the server platform group marketing department, and talks about Intel's move to 45nm, adoption of newer technologies, AMD's quad-core design versus theirs and the server market vs other markets. It's a short read, but interesting. It reveals that Intel took the easy route compared to AMD when it came to getting quad-core out the door, and about why they will not be moving to a native quad-core design like AMD's soon:
AMD's so-called native quad-core processor has a difficult challenge in technical and manufacturing terms and even Intel would have difficulty facing such challenges. Intel currently still adopts two dies on one chip for its Harpertown processor. The technology is much easier, the product has higher yields and performance is almost the same as the native quad-core processor. Therefore, Intel will not launch native quad-core processors in 2007.
Both AMD and Intel have had a large presence at Computex Taipei, trying to get more word out about their newer products, such as their quad-core processors. Particularly for servers, quad-core promises to give huge amounts of performance in a very tiny package. Between AMD and Intel, there isn't a real winner or loser - how can you go wrong with four cores?