Intel expects to have shipped a million quad-core processors to customers worldwide by the end of the second quarter of 2007.

Justin Rattner, Intel chief technology officer, said he was stunned by the success of the new CPU. By the end of 2006, 130,000 chips had found their way into new servers and 165,000 into desktop PCs.

Rattner explained that the company had originally expected to ship a million quad-core processors by the the end of this year. “We would never have imagined the industry response to quad-core CPUs – shipping a million in the first half of 2007 is an amazing accomplishment,” he added.