Intel came out at the Consumer Electronics Show with its first mainstream quad chip, a part branded a Core 2 Quad for the occasion and made immediately available.

There are also two other new quads, giving Intel a total of nine versions of the widget for the desktop and enterprise markets.

AMD has none yet but is expected to have a superior design when its Budapest chip arrives in a few months with the four cores integrated on a single sliver of silicon rather than two dual-cores soldered together and so have lower latency and require less power.

The two other new Xeon quads are meant for single socket servers. They clock in at 2.13GHz and 2.4GHz with a 1066 front-side bus and 8MB of L2 cache.

Intel envisions the high-end 2.4GHz desktop chip running Adobe After Effects, Windows Media Encoder and Win DVD, not to mention the upcoming Vista operating system, and used for digital entertainment, an engine for Intel's slow-off-the-mark Viiv technology.

Intel says it is working with ISVs to get the threading needed to take advantage of multi-cores.

The new desktop chip is priced at $851 in quantities of 1,000. The new Xeons run $690 or $851.

Intel is believed to have gained back market share in servers in Q4, helped by the Clovertown quad it introduced in mid-November.

Lehman Brothers thinks Intel is "aggressively expanding its reliance on non-MPU-based revenues," meaning stuff like chipsets, motherboards and Flash. It also thinks Intel may cut prices on quads to stimulate demand and worries about a rejuvenated price war with AMD. Goldman Sachs is also convinced about a price war.

The fact that Intel is pushing non-MPU goods is probably a good thing since demand for anybody's chips is relatively flat according to the latest figures out of the Semiconductor Industry Association.