French site X86-secret.com reported two months ago that AMD was working on a kind of "reverse Hyper-Threading Technology" that would allow multiple CPU cores to emulate a single one. The approach was said to be intended for one of AMD's future architectures, but X-bit labs now claims AMD is gearing up to offer the functionality on its current processors.
The site quotes industry sources as saying the reverse-HT feature is already built into Athlon 64 X2 chips, and that users will be able to enable it with a simple BIOS and processor driver update. On the operating system front, Microsoft is said to be readying a patch that will allow Windows to detect the X2's two cores as a single one. Little was revealed by X-bit labs' sources about the dirty details of this purported technology, but it is said to enable supporting systems to switch in and out of single-core emulation mode dynamically depending on the type of application a user runs.
This rumor may sound odd, but then again it certainly wouldn't be the first surprising announcement from AMD this year. Regardless, we may not have to ponder very long on its validity—X-bit labs says AMD's reverse-HT may launch "closer to July 24" as a means to counter the Intel Core 2 offensive.
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