Intel quad cores coming in November

Intel CEO Paul Otellini said Tuesday that his company would start to release chips with four cores for the gaming PC market in November, while quad-core chips for the mainstream would come in the first quarter.

Although the chips have four cores, Intel will keep the Core 2 name, Otellini said in his keynote address at the Intel Developer Forum. The gamer chip will be called the Core 2 Extreme, and the mainstream PC chip will be called Core 2 Quad. Fan sites had given an array of names.

So far 13 PC makers have signed up to make quad-core systems, including Dell, Gateway and Alienware.

Otellini also took a jab at rival Advanced Micro Devices. Intel, he said, has already shipped 40 million processors made on the 65-nanometer process. The rest of the industry has shipped a grand total of zero. AMD will come out with 65-nanometer chips later in 2006, about a year after Intel.

Chips made on the 65-nanometer lines will be smaller, faster and, in some cases, consume less energy than their 90-nanometer counterparts. The numbers refer to the average feature size of components on the chip. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

Intel's 45-nanometer chip, code-named Nehalem, is coming next year. The 32-nanometer chip is code-named Gehshem. The company's Israeli design team has been the one most responsible for its low-power chips