Intel expects 85 percent of its server processor shipments to be dual- or multi-core by 2006, a more ambitious timeline than the company had previously spelled out, an executive at the chip maker said.

Stephen Smith, vice president and general manager of Intel's desktop platform operations, made the announcement late Wednesday at the Deutsche Bank Securities Semiconductor & Semi Capital Equipment Conference in Las Vegas.

"In 2006, we see a significant penetration of multi-core and dual-core," Smith said. "All of our development now is focused on CPUs that are multi-core-capable."

Smith also told the group that 40 percent of desktop CPUs and 70 percent of mobile CPUs should ship with dual-core capabilities by 2006. Intel plans its first shipment of dual-core processors sometime next year.

Over the past several months, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel has given its road map a significant shakeup, ditching single-core products such as the 4GHz Pentium 4 and saying it would divert all of the development resources to dual- and multi-core chips.

Intel is in a battle with rival Advanced Micro Devices, Sunnyvale, Calif., in bringing dual-core processors to market, with each working under the assumption that having two processing cores on a single chip will be key to driving performance and functionality gains in addition to market leadership.

In addition, Intel executives say they are trying to move away from using gigahertz as the primary metric for chip performance, turning instead to a combination of clockspeed and other technology including Hyper-Threading and chipset capability.

"We've been delivering performance in PCs for 24 years, and the proxy of that performance has been megahertz," Smith said. "As PCs have matured ... there are other things that count."