Monday, as AMD was in the throes of rolling out its precious Barcelona chip, Intel boosted its revenue target for this quarter from $9 billion-$9.6 billion to between $9.4 billion and $9.8 billion, citing demand for its processors and suggesting market share gains.

Which chips it didn't say, but it did say that its margin, which has suffered in the price war with AMD and was only 47% in Q2, would probably come in at the high end of its previous guidance or "52% plus or minus a couple of points," probably the result of belt-tightening.

Intel hasn't pre-announced since it stopped doing mid-quarter updates over 18 months ago. Its results are due out October 16.

Lehman Brothers thinks notebook demand is particularly strong and that Europe and the emerging markets are buoyant.

The guidance followed last Wednesday's rollout of Intel's first quad-core multiprocessor chips, the 65nm Tigerton, the last of the Xeons to go over to the company's Core microarchitecture and another blast at AMD's Barcelona.

Unlike AMD, Intel has been seeded the market with machines for months after hitting production volumes in June.

The 7300 series includes parts with frequencies of 2.93GHZ at 130W, several 80W devices and a 50W 1.86GHz version for four-socket blades and high-density racks and 32-way scalability at prices ranging from $856 to $2,301 in quantity.

The Tigerton chip fit the Clarksboro chipset and both together comprise what Intel calls its Caneland platform.

Intel claims the new widgets have twice the performance and three times the performance per watt of its previous generation of dual-core products and four times the memory capacity of Intel's older MP platforms, a k a Tulsa. Intel also preens about the chip's "best-in-class" virtualization potentials using VMware.

HP, Fujitsu and Fujitsu Siemens, IBM, Egenera, Hitachi, NEC, Unisys and Lenovo, among others, have designed the Caneland platform into systems. Caneland will be compatible with Intel's upcoming 45nm Core processors like Dunnington, targeted for introduction next year so Intel can talk about investment protection.

• AMD's "Barcelona" Arrives with Rapid Virtualization