Last week, AMD somewhat surprisingly confirmed that it won't book a hotel room to host press briefings parallel to the Fall Intel Developer Forum, which will open its doors on Tuesday, 26 September.

However, AMD couldn't help to completely abandon the tradition of taking advantage of the event and sent out a booklet to tech journalists. Presented as a special edition of a popular tutorial series, we received a "Multicore Processing for Dummies" in our mail. The 32-page booklet, published by Wiley, is accompanied by a note that states:

"We aren't attending this year's IDF, but were hoping you could pass something on to Intel for us. Included is a little something that we think Intel and its customers should find especially useful."

The contents are not particularly new or useful and repeat what you can find about multi-core processors on AMD's website - but it serves the basic purpose of previous AMD visits in the vicinity of IDF in a humorous way: To remind journalists and analysts who are overwhelmed by a wave of announcements and briefings that there are two processor manufacturers.

Of course, we would have preferred to receive some information about the upcoming 4x4 platform instead.