Intel Flexes Its Quad Core

Of course most of the initial supply of quad-core chips will go to first-tier companies like Dell(DELL Quote), which announced servers and workstations based on the new Intel chips last week.

Meanwhile, AMD says it will have its quad-core chip, code-named Barcelona, available by the middle of 2007, and adds that it will release versions of the chip geared for the entire spectrum of servers, including both two-socket and four-socket machines.

AMD is also going out of its way to characterize Barcelona as a "native" quad core, as opposed to Intel's version, which it says is really a pair of Core 2 Duo processors on one chip.

"Time to market really only matters when you bring the right products to market," says AMD spokesman Phil Hughes, in regard to trailing Intel with a quad-core processor.

Whether AMD's approach to quad cores provides a meaningful performance advantage over Intel's design won't be known until chips from both companies are available and can be compared side by side.

But regardless of the debate over what constitutes a true quad-core processor, it's clear that Intel has stepped up its game in the face of competition with AMD.

To some investors, that's good news enough.