When we yesterday reported about French overclocker Tyrou and his adventures with an early sample of Intel’s quad-core processor Kentsfield we were impressed of how mature the processor seemed. With four physical cores Intel hopes to be able to stay one step ahead of AMD after reclaiming the performance throne with its Conroe architecture. Earlier it was said that its first quad-core processors, Kentsfield and Clovertown (for server system), would be launched during the first quarter of 2007. Now it seems though, just as we expected, that the development of this monster chip has been going better than expected.
Therefore Intel’s VP Paul Otellini has now announced that Intel will launch its first quad-core processors already during the fourth quarter of 2006. Even if it most likely will not be any bigger volumes at the launch Intel will be the first company to launch a quad-core processor, most likely with quite a margin, and in this way be able to start hunting system builders for some nice deals. Seeing Intel’s Kentsfield processor on the market before the end of the year at least seems very nice to us at NH.
