Today Intel announced plans for its future in building processor chips in this seemingly crazy race to build them bigger and faster between Intel and AMD. The latest news involves new chips that promise to bump up processing speeds even more with 2, 4, 6 and even 8-core processors.

Intel unveiled a new microprocessor code-named “Dunnington” which will pack in a 6-core processor as a replacement for current Xeon systems with Quad-core processors. According to Pat Gelsinger, general manager of Intel’s digital enterprise group, the new Dunnington processors are expected to be available in the second half of 2008.

Intel made an announcement on Sunday that they’ve decided to give a new family of small processor chips the official name “Atom”. The Atom family of processors will be low-power chips targeting mobile devices that access the internet as well as lower-end, “Internet-centric” mobile computers. The first two chips to be branded with the Atom were previously code-named Silverthorne and Diamondville.

Both of these chips are expected to hit the market early yet this year. Intel’s Sliverthorne chip is designed to run in mobile Internet devices and uses very low amounts of power, even shutting down between processing tasks to further conserve power. The Diamondville chip is a more affordable single processing core chip created for low-end notebook computers.

On Friday Intel announced that it will join Nicholas Negroponte and his One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative to provide inexpensive computers to the children of developing nations. This announcement came as somewhat of a surprise to many since Intel also has a similar, what some might say competing, initiative with its Classmate PC.

The Classmate PC from Intel is priced at $225 and requires external power, while the OLPC machine, originally targeted for $100, is now costing $175 and is powered by cranking a handle on the side.

Intel may have gotten a “can’t beat ‘em – join ‘em” attitude, or it could be that both companies simply realized that they both had the same goal and could possibly achieve a greater good by combining forces. There are speculations that the two products may go …

Today Intel announced a new addition to its quad-core processor family with the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6800.

The Core 2 Extreme delivers the fastest clock speed ever reached for Intel in a quad-core desktop. While this is good news for really any type of processor intensive applications, where it really gets the most notice is from the gamers. Intel mentioned some games that are already built utilizing the quad-core functionality to improve gaming performance, such as Crysis, Supreme Commander and Hellgate London. Intel stated that these games have ‘undergone substantial joint engineering efforts with Intel to use more than two processing threads to their advantage,’.This new quad-core runs at 2.93 GHz with an 8MB cache and supporting 1066 MHz system bus.

This announcement from Intel follows a number of new releases from the chip-maker as it keeps up its …