Mainboard Makers: Half of a Million Intel’s Dual-Core Chips to Hit the Market in 2005

by Anton Shilov
05/30/2005 | 06:43 AM

Sources among makers of mainboards reportedly do not expect Intel Corp. to fulfill its promise and ship millions of dual-core microprocessors this year. The manufacturers believe that Intel will only be able to produce 500 thousand dual-core chips in 2005.

A report over DigiTimes web-site claims that the third quarter shipments of Intel Pentium D-series processors are only expected to reach 100 thousand units, whereas total shipments of dual-core desktop processors this year are projected to achieve 500 thousand milestone, which is considerably lower than Intel originally indicated.

Relatively low amount of desktop dual-core chips to be sold this year is said to slowdown adoption rate of Intel’s new Intel 945-series chipsets. Shipments of mainboards powered by Intel 945-series core-logic sets would attain 7% of total Intel-based mainboard shipments by the end of the year, according to the report. Historically Intel platforms reached 20-30% share six months after debuting.

Intel did not comment on the information.

“We expect to ship millions dual-core processors this year and rapidly ramp into higher volume in 2006 on 65nm,” an Intel executive said in mid-April, 2005.

“Our goal is to ship hundreds of thousands of units this quarter,” said Paul Otellini, Intel’s COO and President, referring to the number of dual-core chips the company aimed to ship in the Q2 of fiscal 2005.

Intel’s first family of dual-core chips for desktops originally code-named Smithfield consists of Intel Pentium D 800-series as well as Intel Pentium Extreme Edition central processing units. Initial Intel Pentium D 800-series central processing units use 800MHz Quad Pumped Bus, integrate 2MB (1MB per core) L2 cache and utilize LGA775 form-factor. The dual-core desktop processors are made using 90nm process technology, each processing engine will use the same architecture with the current Pentium 4 “Prescott” chip and will sport EM64T, EDB as well as Enhanced Intel SpeedStep technologies. Intel Pentium D processors will not enable Hyper-Threading technology leaving this as a prerogative of Intel Pentium Extreme Edition processor 840.

Intel’s dual-core Intel Pentium D products are relatively affordable: $241, $316 or $530 – depending on the speed-bin and model – for 820 (2.80GHz), 830 (3.00GHz) or 840 (3.20GHz) chips respectively. Intel Pentium Extreme Edition processor 840 that also runs at 3.20GHz, but with HT technology enabled, costs $999 in 1000-unit quantities and is available now from PC makers like Dell.