AMD and Intel crack on with dual core plans

The dual core desktop chips formerly codenamed "Smithfield" will begin to be available - to motherboard customers at least - in the period between April and June.

Many had thought that Intel would not be able to deliver these microprocessors until much later this year. That might still be true - there is a difference between a launch date and the date people can actually buy these chips. Intel, as we've revealed before in the main pages of the INQ, is pricing the 820 dual core chip, which has a frequency of 2.8GHz, at $240 which is remarkably cheap.

A number of reasons lie behind Intel's moves. One is that AMD, its arch competitor, is promising that its dual core processors will be available in the Opteron flavour during this quarter. Intel hates to lose face, and particularly dislikes the way it was forced to alter direction during 2004 because of internal and external pressures.

The second reason is that Intel wants to buy some time in the marketplace. While dual core processors are far from being a new idea, the whole X86 world during 2005 has been hit by dual core frenzy. It's a new kind of rat race where the marketing stakes are probably far higher than the technology implications.

There's a major re-organisation still going on inside Intel which started in July last year, and that's another reason why things are changing fast. Paul Otellini, will be at the helm in May, and he's already engineering some other changes which will mean more to us on the outside, eventually. There will be more re-shuffling before May, we reckon.

One of the advantages Intel has is its Vanderpool (VT) technology, which Intel has pulled forward by a whole year for its desktop CPUs. It was originally intended to be launched first for the Itanium but in January it said it is nearly ready to go with the technology.

Basically, Vanderpool will let users run multiple operating systems and applications in different partitions. That has advantages for both businesses and consumers - you will be able to isolate different parts of a PC to run different resources. Virtualisation isn't particularly new either - but it is, when it's concentrated on an Intel desktop. Separating out the functions of a PC with Vanderpool might let you, for example, use one of the dual cores of a Pentium 4 840 to run video editing software, and in a different part of the machine you would be able to run a separate operating system, or dedicate it to perform whatever specific PC task you want it to do.

AMD has now talked more specifically than it has done before about virtualisation with its Pacifica ideas, which apparently are compatible with Vanderpool, now known as VT, but these "new" technologies inevitably have teething problems, like every new baby has.

But if, as our inside informers tell us, Intel has several software manufacturers lined up to deliver things that work when its dual core chips launch, then it may well steal a march on its hated competitor AMD, and also show demonstrable advantages from Vanderpool for businesses and consumers too. And that will sell more Intel microprocessors. And that's what Intel wants.

Now let's see how early AMD can pull its dual core 875 miracles out of its microprocessor bag. µ