The Core 2 Quad is just one of three additional Intel quad-core processors to hit the market today. The announcement was made at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. This makes a total of nine Intel quad-core processors for the desktop and enterprise arenas.

"Today Intel delivers another breakthrough—quad-core technology for anyone's PC," said Intel president and CEO Paul Otellini. "The performance once requiring a supercomputer is now on the desktop."

Pushing more quad-core processors into the market moves Intel another step or two ahead of rival AMD, which recently demonstrated the native quad-core processor that it has in the works. AMD is expected to ship its quad-cores in mid 2007.

A quad-core processor has four independent processors that fit into a single socket, as compared to a single processor that has one processor for each socket. With quad-core, a single-socket server has four cores, and a two-socket server could run eight cores. Four different instruction streams, or applications, can run on that single processor and each can use one of those cores.

The Intel Core 2 Quad processor is available in PCs and in the reseller channel immediately. Intel also announced two quad-core processors for single-socket servers. Today's announcement builds on the company's Core 2 Duo and quad-core microprocessor families. The company has 29 dual- and quad-core processors for sale in the desktop PC, laptop, and server markets.

The multicore processors target performance desktop and gaming PCs.

The Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor 3200 series for single-socket servers was part of today's release. Built on the Intel Core microarchitecture, these products are designed to bring new levels of energy-efficient performance to entry server applications such as e-mail, Web, file, and print. Two new processors are available today with clock speeds of 2.4 and 2.13 GHz with a 1066 front side bus and 8 MB of L2 cache.

The new Intel Core 2 Quad processor Q6600 (2.4GHz) is available now at $851 in 1,000-unit quantities. Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor pricing includes the X3220 (2.4GHz) at $851, and the Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor X3210 (2.13GHz) at $690.