We said the same thing a year and a half ago when there was a lot of competitive noise about AMD's integrated-memory controller. We said look, the design of these things involves thousands of tradeoffs. We felt we could achieve the requisite performance levels without an integrated memory controller, which adds cost to the processor. We said when we get to the point when we feel (an) integrated-memory controller is required to achieve the required performance levels, we will integrate the memory controller.

The same thing goes for the point-to-point links between the processors. In fact, I like to point out that Intel was able to do a quad core -- putting two dual-core dies in a single package -- because it had a front-side bus architecture. We could just tie the front-side buses together internal to the package and drop quad core and do a dual-core socket. No change.

So we were able to get quad-core to market a year ahead of AMD. It was not an option for AMD. And I believe if it had been an option, they would have done it. But it's not an option in their link-based architecture -- in that HyperTransport architecture. So they were basically not players in quad-core for almost a year.
-- Justin Rattner, Wired, Oct 2007