Intel revealed details of a powerful new computer chip featuring four individual microprocessors at the 10th annual Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco on Wednesday.

At the same event, the California-based chip-maker revealed plans to develop a chip with 80 individual microprocessors by 2010.

The company claims its "quad core" microprocessor, which it plans to release in November 2006, will increase computing performance by as much as 50%, while consuming no more energy than dual core chips. The chips will be for business servers with processors designed for desktop computers which will appear later.

Multi-core computer chips process data in parallel, providing this data can easily be divided up. They typically require less power but software sometimes needs to be rewritten to get the most out of the hardware's architecture. Multi-core chips are most commonly used in computer servers but Sony's PlayStation 3 games console uses a chip, called Cell, with 9 cores.

Sandwiched together

Analysts expect the launch of the Intel's four-core chips to put it a strong advantage over arch rival in the electronics market, Advanced Micro Devices. AMD has downplayed the development as simply a sandwiching together of two of Intel's existing dual-core chips.

AMD is also working on its own four-processor chip, which it says will have more carefully integrated features. On Wednesday, the company said it would accelerate the development of its quad-core chips, which were originally scheduled to launch early in 2007.

Intel's leading market share has been gradually eroded thanks to AMD's less costly chips. Rivalry between the two companies has been heating up despite a cooling US chip market. Data published on Wednesday shows that orders for computers fell 9.3% in August, year on year, after rising 15.2% in July.

Vista delay

Analysts attribute slowing computer sales partly to a delayed release of Microsoft's forthcoming Vista operating system, which is now expected to debut early next year.

Intel chief executive Paul Otellini also showed off a prototype 80-core chip, which he said would be able to handle a terabyte of data every second, with each individual processor running at 3.16 Gigahertz. He said the chip would power massive data centres of the future.

"This kind of performance for the first time gives us the capability to imagine things like real-time video search or real-time speech translation from one language to another," Otellini told delegates. "We are talking about a fundamental change in the way that the whole computing infrastructure is built."

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