In a keynote speech at the Intel Developer Forum here, CEO Craig Barrett called the arrival of Nocona "one of the worst-kept secrets in San Francisco." Intel had been widely expected to show off such a chip.
Nonetheless, having the chip next quarter is earlier than many analysts had predicted. Nocona will use the same core as Prescott, Intel's current desktop processor, meaning that Intel could quickly migrate the 64-bit architecture to desktop processors.
During his keynote, Barrett demonstrated a 64-bit x86 chip running on a Dell Dimension XPS desktop machine.
The move to add 64-bit extensions to the existing x86 architecture is a long time in coming for Intel. Rival AMD has been planning such an approach for a while, having already shipped both its Opteron server chips and its Athlon 64 desktop processors.
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