Intel plans to ship 1 million Pentium Ds before year end

Intel said it expects to ship 100,000 dual-core Pentium D processors during the coming quarter, and a total of one million dual-core processors before the end of the year.

Intel today launched the home platform which includes the Pentium D processors and the 945 Express chipset. The business platform was also unveiled today, but it will still take a year before it will feature dual-core processors.

Intel says the business platform should be a stable image platform. This means that it will take long periods of qualification before new technologies like dual-core processors will make an entry in the platform. They explain this by stating businesses are interested in ultimate stability, not just in having the latest technology like dual-core processors.

Currently Intel ships more than 40 million processors per quarter, so analysts believe 1 million will be an achievable goal Intel. But they do point out that the Pentium D design is rather bad compared to AMD's dual-core offering. The Pentium D is basically a quick-to-market design which has two separate processors inside a single chip, rather than a dual-core design that is build from scratch.

Mike Feibus, an analyst from TechKnowledge, believes the next step for Intel will be to design a dual-core processor from ground up. He says the Pentium D design is a much more costly way to achieve dual-core processors.