Intel's most complex x86 desktop chip ever, a tiny part loaded with an incredible 731 million transistors that's been five years in the making, has been released to the most dubious demand environment ever, especially for desktops - dubious enough for Intel to have cut its guidance last week.

We're talking here about the first of the company's long-expected new-microarchitecture Nehalem chips, officially called Core i7, its first AMD-like "true" quad with all four cores on a single sliver of silicon and - also AMD-like - no front-side bus.

Intel general session at SYS-CON's 4th International Virtualization Conference & Expo, November 19, 2008, San Jose, California

They were launched from Japan on Monday, with boxes available from Dell and Gateway. According to Tim Luke at Barclays Capital, over 100,000 units have been shipped.

Intel won't have the laptop and server versions of the thing - including an eight-core Xeon - until next year, followed by shrinking the currently 45nm part to 32nm in 2010/11.

Of course the available parts could be used for a 1P server. Intel is supposed to have two-socket parts early next year and four-socket ones as well as high-volume client chips in the second half.

AMD, which just launched its new Shanghai server chips, its first 45nm quads, hopes to make hay while the sun shines with one-, two- and four-sockets widgets.

Anyway, the fastest of the three new Intel chips, the gee-whiz 3.2GHz Extreme Edition 965, is priced in quantity at $999. The 2.66GHz 920 is $284 and the 2.93GHz is $562.

All three have 8MB of L3 cache and three channels of DDR3 1066 memory and carry Intel's best shot at power management, energy efficiency and memory use.

Turbo Boost, for instance, is supposed to accelerate performance to match the user's immediate needs and workloads, adjusting the clock speed of the cores without increasing power consumption. And desktops can now go into sleep states like notebooks to save power.

The devices also use Hyper-Threading, and can deliver eight-thread performance. Figure up to 30%-40% improvement in SPECint and up to 50% improvement in SPECfp.