Intel ups ante with two-chip November quad-cores

Stan Beer
Wednesday, 27 September 2006 06:42

Your IT - Home IT

Chipmaker Intel kicked off its San Francisco developer conference yesterday with an aggressive address by CEO Paul Otellini in which the company committed to have its promised quad-core processors on the market in November, more than six months ahead of rival AMD.

• Announcements

Otellini's address focussed heavily on the company's aggressive push to win back market share through the timely release of new and more powerful chip technology.

According to Otellini, the company's technological superiority strategy is working, based on the successful introduction of the Core 2 Duo dual-core chip platform. Otellini said Intel has shipped more than 5 million of the new chips in the first 60 days, a company record.

While Intel will be first to market with quad-core processors, some analysts and market watchers believe the lead that Intel has over rival AMD is not as great as the market leader is trying to portray.

The bulk of of Intel's quad-core desktop range will not be available until Q1 2007, at which time much of the market will waiting on the release of AMD's quad-core solution in Q2.

In addition, market watchers, helped to a great degree by AMD prompting, have focussed on the fact that the Intel next generation quad-core solution being hyped for release in November is in fact really a twin dual-core package of two chips rather than a true quad-core chip.