We have already shared with you some news from Intel’s shareholders meetings in our previous news story today. However, we have mostly focused on the launching and shipping schedule for the new Core based CPUs, so some very interesting facts remained omitted. Let me correct this.

As we have already told you, Intel is planning to raise the share of Woodcrest processors to 75% by the end of 2006, which is in only 6 months! How aggressively will the dual-core processor share increase in the desktop and mobile segments? Two slides from the Intel’s presentation can help us answer this question.

As you can see from the graph, the share of dual-core processors will exceed that of single-core ones this year already. By the end of the year, the single-core solutions will make about 20-25% at the most. It is important to understand that it will take a long time before they will be able to declare a 100% transition to dual-core architecture. At least not until the end of 2007, when the production cost of dual-core processors drops down so greatly, that it will no longer be cost-effective to manufacture single-core solutions.

Secondly, Intel has revised their forecast regarding the expansion of the dual-core processors in the desktop and mobile segments. They used to claim that 70% of all desktops will be dual-core by the end of 2006. Now this value has been raised to 75%. The corrections in the mobile segment are even greater: the 70% share has been increased to 90%.

So, we clearly see Intel’s motivation behind the rapid transition to dual-/multi-core processors. The first quad-core CPUs are expected to be announced in early 2007, although they will not be widely spread at that time: the software infrastructure will not yet be ready by then, and Intel has no chipsets with “dual” bus to really take advantage of the frequency potential of the four cores.