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At the first full day of the Intel Developer Forum Fall 2006, Intel has completely taken the wraps off its first quad-core chip and announced availability in November. The chip, previously codenamed Kentsfield, is now officially called the Core 2 Extreme QX6700.

Being composed of two separate dual-core dies in one physical package, the new offering will run at 2.66GHz. It's essentially a pair of Conroe processors, as used in the current Core 2 Duo parts, giving it 8MB of Level 2 cache in total - 4MB per die.

As well as announcing the parts, Intel is showing them off too: hands-on demonstration PCs fitted with the new parts are on display at the event for attendees to play with.

The

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drawback is that although the Conroe core is relatively frugal in its power consumption, drawing only around 65W, putting two of them together means power consumption figures have doubled to pre-Core levels, with the QX6700 rated at a TDP (thermal design power) of 130W.

Also announced - but as yet undisplayed - were the standard desktop quad-core parts, to be known as Intel Core 2 Quad and be released some time in January 2007. Again, these will be two Conroe processors in one package, but with lower clock speeds than the QX6700. Power consumption figures are likely to be in the 80-100W range.

Accusations that Intel has rushed the QX6700 and other quad-core parts to market purely in order to beat rival AMD are met with short shrift from Intel. AMD is keen to point out that its parts will be 'native' quad-core, with all four cores integrated onto one die. Intel's line, as explained by Stephen L Smith, director of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, is more prosaic about the definition of quad core. "A quad-core processor is one that delivers four processing cores in one physical processor or socket", he said. As far as Intel is concerned, at least for now, that's all there is to it and the company has beaten AMD to market by several months. AMD, no doubt, will disagree.