Oh wow.  Two six-core chips on a single die.  There's virtually nothing that could take advantage of something like that.  But I guess it's the ultimate future proofing.  Get a dual socket motherboard and you got yourself two dozen cores.  We'll see.  12-core will come eventually, but if AMD really is planning on skipping 8 cores, then they could even mean next year. 

Yeah, I can't imagine much short of Matlab taking advantage of 12 cores, but I'll buy one! I sure hope they're looking at finishing this by next year.

You could always render/edit HD video and run 3D design at the same time -- that would probably stress the cores a little bit :)

Just imagine encoding HD video, compiling some C code, unzipping a large archive and playing a modern quad-core capable game at the same time. Mmmm, excessive in the best way. Now we only need consumer-grade data storage solutions that can keep up.

They better come up with something serious for the memory system, since they will be really struggling to keep those 12 cores fed with code. 

That's Crazy :p..

Anyways a few years ago, people thought that by this year their would be 8ghz Pentium processors, not Multi-Core Processors :)

True.  Both Intel and AMD at the beginning of the decade had ambitious plans to reach 10ghz!  Netburst Pentium IV's actually came closer than anything yet, but not quite there.  Although extreme overclockers reached 8ghz.

Haha, I wonder if this every becomes a reality if it will be able to keep up with Intels new 8-Core processor, I forgot the name of it right now. That new 8-core processor is suppose to be a beast. BTW, AMD's 4-core processor is a shame so far. Even the fastest 4-core processor that AMD has can barelly keep up with the Q6600, or maybe exceed it just a little bit.

True, peti, but that's why AMD's fastest quad-core is priced about the same as the Q6600.  Unfortunately AMD cannot afford to sell them so cheap, and the company did not make profits last quarter.

i would love to see a multi core gpu compared to a 12 core cpu. id be much much more happy with a 4 core gpu and a 8 core cpu.

yeah having more cores is better, but not too much and in terms of gaming id rather have the gpu power. 

LovelyCrap:

Just imagine encoding HD video, compiling some C code, unzipping a large archive and playing a modern quad-core capable game at the same time. Mmmm, excessive in the best way. Now we only need consumer-grade data storage solutions that can keep up.

I agree that there need to be some other technological innovations and improvements before a 12-core (probably even 8-core) system is completely viable... Triple channel memory will be a big step (coming out with new nehalem architecture)... It will be interesting to see what comes out in the next couple years... AMD and Intel are trying to push each other out of the market!

Good luck trying to fab that chip! Seriously, that'd be such an insanely huge chip to actually make. Even if you take their current quad core which is 450 million transistors and add no more cache nor take into account the extra circuitry involved then it'd be a 900 million transistor chip! So we're easily talking over 1 billion transistors on a single chip, nutso. Even Intel's current fab tech, which is ahead of AMD, can barely make their 1 billion plus transistor chips. AMD would be smarter to focus more in the mainstream, they just can't compete with Intel in the high end right now.