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It’s been a long time coming.



Over the past year, the hype machine has been beating the drum for Intel’s new processor architecture. Dubbed Core, the new architecture is a radical shift for a company that was once the chief proponent of ramping up CPU frequency. Core 2, the first desktop product, promises to be faster than the Pentium D series and even faster than the Athlon 64 FX-62. However, those last tests weren’t completely kosher, as the “FX-62” was really an overclocked FX-60 running on DDR400, rather than the DDR2-based FX-62, and they were done under Intel’s supervision.

Even so, it’s been clear from all the leaks, sanctioned testing, and industry scuttlebutt that Core 2 is fast. But does it really perform in a wider array of applications than has been previously leaked or revealed? We’ll answer that question shortly.

Today, Intel finally reveals the details of their Core 2 CPUs, allowing us to present our full independent analysis. We obtained a pair of Core 2 CPUs from Intel: the Core 2 Duo E6700, which runs at 2.66GHz and will cost approximately $530, and the Core 2 Extreme X6800, which clocks at 2.93GHz and is priced at $999. (These are prices for quantities of 1,000.)

How will AMD respond to the new Intel Core 2 Duo? Think “4×4”, power, and price, executives say. Click here for more.

We described the Core microarchitecture back in March. Core 2 owes much of its heritage to the Intel’s mobile Pentium M processor line. The first iteration of that architecture, known as Banias, was the creation of Intel’s Israeli design team. But Core 2 isn’t just another iteration of the Pentium M. Instead, it steals a little from the old NetBurst architecture and adds enhancements of its own.

The net result is a processor with a substantially shorter instruction pipeline than NetBurst (Intel’s name for the architecture of the Pentium 4 and Pentium D processors.) In Core 2, substantially more instructions are executed per clock cycle, so even though Core 2 processors run at a lower clock frequency than previous Intel desktop lines, they run applications faster. Core 2 is also more power efficient: Intel’s goals for the mainstream CPU is to maintain 65W, versus the 90W to 95W of the mainstream Pentium Ds or the 130W of the high-end Pentium D 940 or Extreme Edition CPUs.

The net result is a CPU that uses less power while running applications substantially faster. Let’s take a look at the Core 2 architecture before we try to answer the question “how much faster?”

Continued…



