Some senior industry sources have confirmed that Intel wants to go triple core as well. AMD announced its triple core and it will start shipping it in early 2008, but its still unknown when Intel will start doing the same thing.

Desktop systems would be the market for such a product and three is better than two and at the same time worse than four so the math works quite easily.

Intel can take dual cores that are part of the quads and reuse the duals when one core doesn't work and make its own triple core and this will happen as soon as Intel decides that it really needs one.