Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, has demonstrated some of the firm's dual-core processors and promised that the company will offer the technology in all its product lines.

Gelsinger told delegates at the Intel Developer Forum that he expects to begin delivering dual-core chips for PCs in the second quarter of this year and server dual-core chips by year-end.

By the end of 2006, 70 per cent of desktop and notebook processors and 85 per cent of server computer processors in production would be dual-core.

"We will see the fastest rate of performance increase in the past 20 years," said Gelsinger. "We will see tenfold performance improvements, compared to the standard rate of three times. This is stunning growth, all down to performance in parallelism."

The first desktop dual-core systems will be available in the second half of this year. The Pentium Extreme Edition 840 will have 3.2GHz dual-core processors, with 2MB level two cache and 800MHz front side bus.

"Intel is going for multiple cores and holding back speed increases for a very simple reason: power," said Ray Orr, chief technology officer at Potentia Semiconductors.

"The faster the chips go the more power they consumer. But with dual-core processors you get performance increases without so much power drain as they can share common components."

Gelsinger also gave the first showing of Intel's 65 nanometre chips, codenamed Presler and Yonah. Presler is a replacement for Intel's current Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processors and will be out next year, while Yonah is Intel's next-generation mobile processor.

The future of the Itanium platform was also discussed, after rumours that it was to be dropped.

"We see a rich roadmap for the Itanium," said Gelsinger. "We are already working on the next generation of Itanium processors. In 2007 you will see Tukwila, the next generation of the Itanium line."