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Ready for dual-core notebooks? The media certainly was. At Singapore Hard Rock Cafe, Gary Willihnganz, director of Marketing for Intel Asia Pacific, officially launched the platform for Asia formerly codenamed Napa and dual-core Yonah processors. In conjunction with the announcement, partners of Intel used this opportunity to showcase their latest notebooks based on the new technology.

The latest mobile technology was declared production-ready at CES 2006 in Las Vegas. Unlike its predecessor, the latest processor is split into two distinct product lines: The Core Duo and Core Solo. According to Intel, the Core Duo chip should deliver a 68 percent performance gain over the current Sonoma single-core processors and reduce battery consumption by 28 percent. By splitting computing tasks into two data streams, both processor cores are put to task which improves performance. The Core Solo chip is a cheaper single-core processor which handles data input in a single stream. At the same time, the chipset’s front side bus speed has been boosted to 667MHz for quicker information transfer.

With plans to ship over a million units of the latest chips worldwide over the next three weeks, the new platform looks set to storm the market this year. Intel claims that over 230 notebook based on the Napa platform are slated for release, with Acer and Powermatic likely to be first to market. As Hyperthreading applications are already in use, these software are able to fully utilize the dual-core processors. Users looking for a 64-bit processor need not wait long as Intel has plans to release a 64-bit-capable Yonah chip by mid of 2006.

Source: CNet Asia

Aiming to keep its focus on Windows Vista, Microsoft is now targeting 2007 for its next Windows XP service pack update.

In a posting to its life cycle Web site, Microsoft set a preliminary date of the second half of next year for the release of Windows XP Service Pack 3 for both home and professional editions. That puts its debut well past the arrival of Vista, which is slated for the second half of this year and later than both outsiders and some insiders had originally predicted.

"We will be releasing another service pack for XP over the course of the product life cycle, and we are tentatively targeting the second half of 2007 for release," a Microsoft representative said in an e-mail to CNET News.com. "However, right now our priority is Windows Vista–we’ll have more information to share about the next service pack for XP after Windows Vista ships."

Souce: CNet News