In the words of a great Snickers commercial, “Great googly moogly!”
When Montecito debuts in 2005, the processor will include 24 Mbytes of Level 3 cache memory, as well as two cores, each with multithreading capabilities. Montecito’s successor, Tanglewood, will feature more than two cores. This multithread, multicore architecture enables up to 6 Mbytes of on-die cache as well as 48 Gbps of bandwidth and a 6.4-Gbps system bus. In other words, Montecito will be fast, with low-latency access to large data sets.
My jaw literally dropped when I read this. This processor is going to be fast, really, really fast.
The two core technology was first delivered by IBM in their PowerPC chip. This means that effectively that each CPU is effectively two. This combined with multithreading means that your machine will be able to to more and more work with each cpu cycle.