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Taking the milk to the market a full two days early, Intel put its new Pentium Extreme Edition 840 chip on sale today to ensure a lead over rival Advanced Micro Devices' own dual-core processors scheduled for release on April 21.

Both companies ramped up the release to be the first dual-core vendor for PC's and servers. And though Intel seems to be the first out of the box, the victory would remain merely symbolic as AMD's schizophrenic microchip, Opteron, has been shown to outperform Pentium

If that wasn't enough, all but Dell have chosen AMD's chip over Intel's. IBM, HP, and Sun Microsystems are releasing servers based on the Opteron chip. Dell will remain a one-chip company, locked in the embrace of Intel.

According to IT World,

"Opteron's integrated memory controller and multiple Hypertransport interconnects help it outperform Intel's Xeon processor on many benchmarks, especially ones measuring the performance of memory-intensive applications, according to third-party reviewers."

The dual-core processors boost computing power by working like "two brains" in problem solving, splitting the information to be analyzed. This especially helps with graphics and video.