During a secret meeting (will tell you everything we know when the embargo lifts tomorrow at 10pm PDT) at Intel's RNB (Robert Noyce Building) headquarters in Santa Clara, we had the opportunity to ask Intel's chief his views on quad-core's adoption for 2007. In a nutshell, quad-core chips are clearly coming to "mainstream" price points (ie close to dual-core pricing) and Paul Otellini still expects to ship a million "quads" by mid-year. "We shipped a lot already in just 3 or 4 months". A view that is not shared by AMD execs who expect a much slower adoption of "quads", than the single to dual-core transition, due to the lack of software support in the desktop segment. Finally, our friend Ashley Vance from the Register asked Otellini about AMD's Quads 40% plus performance gap with Intel's and here's what the big chief had to say: "whenever they get one [Barcelona] will have to run their part against the first of our shipping products [...] I'm quite confortable we'll maintain the performance lead". I think Intel is out again for a "hot" summer!