Meanwhile, AMD launched Phenom dual-, triple- and quad-core versions to target a budget desktop processor market. AMD considered the quad core Phenoms to be the first "true" quad core design, as these processors were a monolithic multi-core design meaning all cores on the same silicon die, unlike Intel's Core 2 Quad series which were a multi-chip module (MCM) design. The processors were on the Socket AM2+ platform.

Microsoft and Intel announced to invest $20 million in Parallel Computing Research over the next 5 years on March 8 2008. University of California, Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) were part of the research. The dual and quad core multiprocessor was increasingly becoming common at the time and the giant tech corporations wanted to support the parallel computing researchers who were developing better ways of writing applications that could take advantage of multicore processors.

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Comparison of OpenMP performance using AMD and Intel multicore processors was conducted in Telcom University in 2018. This study simulated breaking waves by using Navier-Stokes equation which was parallelized with OpenMP. The below table shows the specifications of AMD and Intel multicore processors used to perform the comparison.

[[File: Specifications_multicoreprocessor_intel_amd.JPG|700px]]