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Multi-core processors are seen by the industry as a way of continuing to increase the performance of new designs without having to increase the clock speed with all the associated problems of overheating. This week Intel abandoned its attempt to build a 4GHz Pentium processor in favour of a dual-core design.

With both AMD and Intel now firmly committed to a dual-core future, Microsoft could have taken the view that this was in fact two processors albeit on a single piece of silicon. Instead the company has decided to continue to treat one processor as one processor.

At present there are no dual-core processors on the market. AMD has demonstrated a dual-core Opteron and Intel an Itanium. However, no commercial products are expected until mid 2005. Intel has also said that the x86 Xeon server chip won't be dual core until 2006.