Intel's Core 2 Duo Processors

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, July 26, 2006, 04:30 PM EDT

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."

Tags: Intel, Core 2, Processors, Core, processor, CES, process, Core 2 Duo, duo, pro, SSO

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com