Intel's Core 2 Duo Processors
It seems Michael Schuette is rather impressed with Intel's new Core 2 Duo processors. As usual, Michael give plenty of technical detail in his write up, and in a rare move he gave the Core 2 Duo an "Exceptional Hardware Award". For reference, our coverage of the new Core 2 Duo E6700 and Core 2 Extreme X6800 is available right here.
"After years of senseless netbursting against a frequency wall, Intel is finally going back to real processing with their latest creation dubbed Core 2 architecture. Based on the original design of the Pentium3 with the additional features of dynamic wide execution and a cache that is truly shared between cores, the new processor family has at least on paper what it takes to overcome some of the legacies of the PSB interface. Intelligent prefetching of data further masks some of the memory access latencies and smart power management does the rest to indicate a 180 degree turnaround from the klutzy P4 architecture we had to endure for half a decade.
By the end of the day (or this review), we have some real CPU power measurements that put the Conroe a.k.a. Core 2 Duo at the very top of processing efficiency with performance improvements over the Smithfield core of up to 560 %. In the wake, even AMD's most efficient CPUs bite the dust. If this sounds unrealistic, we have the data to back up our claims."
