Intel Begins Shipping Dual-Core Chips

In the race to bring dual-core processors to the market, Intel may have a leg up on rival AMD. The company announced at the Intel Developer Forum in Taiwan that dual-core "Extreme Edition" chips have begun shipping to customers and could reach consumers before the end of the month.

"We just passed an important milestone," Abhi Talwalkar, general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group, said in a statement. "Intel is shipping the Intel Pentium Processor Extreme Edition 840 running at 3.2 GHz and Intel 955X Express Chipsets, Intel's first dual-core processor-based platform, to our customers."

AMD is expected to unveil its own dual-core Opteron on April 21 to commemorate the two-year birthday of the chip. Both companies have taken a different approach to the dual-core market, however, with AMD focusing on servers and Intel going after high-performance desktops.

By including two processing units into a single design, dual-core chips will bring improved performance when running multiple applications - even though speeds will initially be lower than current single core offerings.

Some analysts see the race to be first as a way that AMD can better its position in the market against Intel, the only other major player in the CPU industry. Intel retains about 82 percent of the processor market, with AMD holding a little under 16 percent.