If you follow the war that rages between the two largest CPU manufacturers, Intel and AMD, things are heating up again in the race to be first. Intel is currently on schedule to ship their quad core mainstream parts in Q1 2007, the quad core extreme edition is due in November. AMD isn’t going to be able to match that launch day according to the scuttlebutt.

However, from what I hear it seems that this move by Intel may be a repeat of the first to dual core war that played out when the dual core parts first hit market. Namely Intel won the bragging rights by getting their dual core part to market first. However, to do so they had an inferior CPU design that didn’t allow the two cores to talk directly.
What Intel did was basically put two separate cores inside the processor and have them talk via the FSB. Whereas AMD took its time with their last to market dual core CPU, but thoroughly trashed Intel when it came to performance thanks to their much more efficient direct connection for the two cores to communicate over.