Intel is bringing its low cost laptops which were designed for poor children to the market in the US and Europe.

The second generation of the Classmate PC will retail for between $250 and $350, early reports suggest, and will run on the Windows operating system.

Classmate PC's were originally targeted at emerging markets and Intel plans to hike up production levels in 2008.

Manufacturers in India, Mexico and Indonesia have begun selling Classmate PC's but figures suggest only fewer than 100,000 have been sold to date.

Information leaked onto the internet suggests that Intel could be about to reveal a six-core chip.

Various sites have reported that a slide which appears to show a "Dunnington" version of Xeon chip with six Penryn processing cores has leaked out after being mistakenly included in a Sun Microsystems presentation.

According to UK site pocket-lint.co.uk, the slide "showed that the three pairs of cores share a 3MB level 2 cache, which means that all six cores would then share a 16MB level 3 cache".

Chip manufacturer Intel have revealed more details about its new ultra-low-power processor, which it claims will make true mobile internet access a reality.

The company offered more technical details about the processor, codenamed Silverthorne, at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in San Francisco.

According to the company, the chip will deliver one to two GHz of performance in a device that fits in your hand or pocket when it is released later in the year.