At the Hot Chips 2012 symposium on high performance microprocessors, bigwig chipmakers Intel and AMD talked about their existing chips as well as about their future processors.

While Intel's talks pivoted around its existing Ivy Bridge processors and its forthcoming Xeon Phi (Knights Corner) Many Integrated Core (MIC) design; AMD disclosed details about its upcoming Jaguar and Steamroller core designs.

Discussing Intel's third-generation Ivy Bridge processors, Intel chief engineer Sanjeev Jahagirdar revealed that the processors will boast several improvements like support for some fresh instructions and security features, enhanced support for reduced power memory and overclocking, and some instructions per clock upgrading.

Meanwhile, about Intel's Xeon Phi co-processor, which will chiefly target high performance computing market, George Chrysos - a senior principal engineer at Intel, and the processor's chief architect - said that the MIC family has been designed particularly for highly-parallel workloads in fields like physics, chemistry, biology and finance.

So far as AMD is concerned, the company's biggest talking point was its forthcoming Steamroller architecture which is expected to be the core of its high-end and server products coming up in 2013. The company said that the Steamroller design will fix some bottlenecks in its existing Bulldozer architecture, with the changes essentially meant to "feed the cores faster" to enhance the single-core performance.

About its upcoming Jaguar core design, AMD said that the new core design will replace the Bobcat core used on its C- and E-series processors; thereby hinting at a move to a quad-core design.