HARDWARE.

The article presents trends in microprocessors in 2006. The year marked the growth of green central processing unit, the trickle down of multicore and an industry-altering merger that put coprocessors and the marketing of AMD back in business. The x86 dominated the year, with Intel delivering microarchitecture for desktop and mobile computers. The improvement in funneled bus design allowed Intel to raise its bus clock to 1066MHz and to adopt a new serial memory interface called Fully Buffered DIMM. Intel has also become the first to market with hardware-assisted virtualization. AMD has coined a term megatasking, to describe a working style enabled by its massively parrallelized architecture.