Even though neither of the two companies has made an official statement about it, both Intel and AMD are ending 2008 with some new quad-core chips, the Intel Core 2 Quad Mobile Processor Q9000 and the Phenom II processor, respectively.

Intel’s new mobile processor is currently being promoted by Acer in their recently announced laptop, Aspire 8930G-7665, with the Q9000 running with 12MB of shared L2 cache, a 1066 MHz front side bus and a speed rate that clocks out at about 2.53 GHz.

The chip is priced at $348 in 1,000-unit lots, which makes it much cheaper than Intel’s other mobile quad-core chips that all cost $851, while the QX9300 amounts to $1,038.

In addition to Intel's processor, Acer’s notebook offers other features such as an 18.4-inch WUXGA Acer CrystalBrite screen at 1920 x 1080 resolution, 4GB of DDR3 memory, a NVIDIA GeForce 9700M GT graphics set, a 500GB SATA hard drive, a 6-in-1 card reader, a Webcam, Dolby HomeTheater-class sound and Windows Vista Premium 64-bit, while its price is of approximately $1,800.

Apart from the Intel Core 2 Quad Mobile Processor Q9000, Intel is said to have also brought forth four other mobile processors, the Core 2 Duo T9800, P9600, T9550 and P8700.

As for AMD, it has already rendered its Phenom II processors available for online pre-orders, while an official release for the chip is scheduled to take place at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which will spread from 8 to 11 January in Las Vegas.

AMD’s new processor will work at speeds up to 3GHz and will also include an 8MB cache.