ABOUT ONE YEAR AGO, Intel went public with the first news of its near-religious conversion to the gospel of multicore processors. Prior to that fateful day, Intel had been talking optimistically about hitting 4GHz clock speeds by the end of 2004 and eventually reaching 10GHz with the Pentium 4 "Netburst" architecture. Such achievements were, in fact, business as usual at the world's largest chipmaker before news of its conversion. But everything changed last May when the company ripped up its roadmaps and started over again, deemphasizing clock speed as a measure of performance and reworking its CPU development efforts top to bottom to favor multiple processor cores per chip.