Intel has sold more than a million quad-core processors, the company claimed late last week, making good a pledge made in September 2006 to beat that target before arch-rival AMD sells just one quad-core server chip.

AMD's four-core 'Barcelona' processor' won't appear until August, the chip maker said last week.

Intel representatives in the US and Asia made the million-chip claim, which specifically centres on the giant's Xeon 5300 'Clovertown' server processor - the Core 2 Extreme and Core 2 Quad CPUs it's sold push the total even higher, but probably not much higher.

Intel's own projections don't envisage demand for desktop quad-core chips to hit ten per cent of its desktop processor sales in Q3.

Market watcher iSuppli has been less generous, forecasting that only five per cent of mainstream PCs sold a quarter later, in Q4. However, high-end quad-core systems will fare better since 33 per cent of all PCs sold in Q4 will be four-core, iSuppli said recently.

Intel last week told its customers it had released updated versions of its current desktop quad-core offerings, all of which now consume less power than they did a week ago.

And the expected revamp of the chip maker's Core 2 Duo line on 22 July is also thought to encompass the release of new, faster Core 2 Quad and Core 2 Extreme quad-core chips.

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