Sidebar: Multicore chips aplenty

A quick rundown of the multicore options available now and those that will soon be on the market.

-- Intel in late 2006 introduced its first quad-core Xeon processors. The company projects it will sell more than a million quad-core processors by midyear. The processors are manufactured by packaging two Intel dual-core processors in a single chip.

-- AMD promises its first quad-core Opteron processors by midyear. They will be manufactured using a "native" design that will place four independent cores on a single chip.

-- IBM has been offering quad-core Power processors since 2005. Similar to Intel, the chips are manufactured using a multichip module.