AMD's plans to best their own quad-core server offerings is already underway, and according to them it'll be less than two years before they have a behemoth 12-core beast on the ready. Their "Maranello" platform will be the first to feature such processors, following up a set of 6-core processors planned for existing platforms.
The 12-core CPU, codenamed "Magny-Cours", will rely on DDR3 memory and include additional HyperTransport 3.0 links. While no mention is made of a desktop offering with the same number of cores, existing desktop workloads today can rarely make efficient use of two let alone four or even twelve cores, though that trend is slowly changing. No mention is made in regards to clock speeds for these future processors, but they will be crafted by taking two six-core dies and putting them together, much as how the first few generations of Intel multi-core CPUs came into the world.