AMD and Intel: a real divergence?

I picked up this thread at Sun’s blog, and then did a little digging on my own. AMD’s December analyst call covered their roadmap, and they are positioning themselves as going the other way from Intel.

Intel’s talking about 10s to 100s of cores on a processor (for example, here). AMD says that amounts to re-starting the megahertz race and is instead talking about Accelerated Processing Units (via The Tech Report):

Accelerated Processing Units, or APUs, will be multi-core chips that include any mix of processor cores and other dedicated processors. Fusion, AMD’s integrated CPU and graphics processor, is AMD’s first step in that direction.

This sounds a lot like Cray’s Adaptive Supercomputing effort, just on a different scale. If Intel and AMD actually have a meaningful divergence, maybe we’re finally going to get some chocolate added to our vanilla HPC building blocks.