Intel officially closed the books on the Pentium era on Thursday with the Core 2 Duo, its most important product launch in 13 years. Two classes of Core 2 Duo processors were released Thursday. PCs based on the Core Extreme processor are available immediately. However, ‘Extreme’ is an appropriate description for both the performance and price of those systems, and they are only appropriate for the deep-pocketed performance-starved user. Mainstream systems at more affordable prices will start to appear in early August, Intel CEO said.
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I agree that Core 2 is a HUGE step in the right direction for Intel, but I think the name “Core 2” is a bit confusing. Even some of the technical people I know are confusing “Core 2” with “Core Duo” which was launched not so long ago.
For those wanting more info on the chip I would start here:
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2795
Even the $316 2.4 E6600 manages to trump everything AMD has on the market and they were able to overclock it to 4GHz with air cooling.
Core 2 also has 85 million fewer transistors than Pentium D and much better power consumption (although still #2 here to AMD).
Nice job Intel.
Core 2 also has 85 million fewer transistors than Pentium D and much better power consumption (although still #2 here to AMD).
So they’ve finally followed the age old engineering principle of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid!) – it was getting rediculous before; massive clock speeds, elaborate cooling methods and massive numbers of transisters working in the less efficient way possible.
As for energy use; you are right about that one; the cost of energy is going up, and companies will look for what ever ways they have to cut costs with the rising price of oil; raising the temperature to when the office air conditioning turns on, power efficient PC’s (imagine how much could be saved in an organisation with 30,000 desktops); cutting down on the number of km’s that the company employees receive in petrol re-emburcements to encourage people to be more efficient with cars.
…I’ve been saying it all along, Merom/Conroe/Woodcrest are the most amazing CPU’s to come out of Intel in a long time. I’m glad that Intel finally realized that you need to design and build an efficient CPU for your customers, not just something that’s clocked sky-high yet consumes tons of energy. Automakers should take the same approach for that matter.
Energy is only going to be more important in the future so it makes sense to squeeze the most juice out of these devices.
Any word on whether the Apple MacBook/MacBook Pros are gonna get these any time soon?
Looking to buy one later this week, but if Core 2 Duo is going to be put in them soon, I’ll just wait a few more weeks.
I am just another consumer like you (an apple a day keeps the doctor away). But be aware that there will be (very likely) some announcements at the Developer Conference next week and we may expect something for the Apple Expo in Paris too.
So if I were you I wouldn’t buy anything until mid-September.
Personally, because of my finances, will have to wait until January .. and more likely mid-February since Apple usually sells stocks for Xmas + January and renews lines in February.
Have a good day.
Well, im glad Intel has finally gotten back on their game. It seemed like for about 4 years their pipelines were reaching for the moon and (to continue with figurative speech) their processors could heat a space shuttle. Im really happy about this. Now, I’ve been an AMD fan for many years, and it seemed like AMD was the only company really inovating. Hopefully this will spur another “arms race” between the two companies. Only instead of the megahertz war it will be cores/performance per watt.
Availabikity: Compared to the AMD AM2 series launch core 2 duo supplies seem to be rather limited, which is odd as Intel has significantly more mfg cap and on top of the raw # of fabs a significantly mfg process. I guess that the OEMs are really sucking the supply lines dry right about now, and/or I wonder if Apple got a healthy shipment, maybe for a powermac G5 successor(finally, as I think that they really need to move everything to x86 and start phasing out ppc support considering their size…)
Pricing: the limited availability seems to also be pushing retail prices a bit higher than I anticipated, c. $10-20 dependent upon where you look online.
motherboards: also seem to be in limited supply ass to what supports core 2 duo power reqs. Only a couple lowish end, and a couple highish end boards v AM2 launch had a nice spread.
performance: what can you say. Core 2 duo is pretty sweet at this point. I just wish that GPU mfgs could do the same…
Name: Core 2 Duo was a bad choice considering they already had the core duo line, hence the logical name should have been core duo 2… oh well, I’ll like refer to them as E6YYY and X6YYY
buying: I agree with some of the others, with supplies and choices as they stand I’d wait a month or so before buying. Let the channels fill & bloat driving down price unless you REALLY REALLY GOTTA HAVE IT RIGHT THIS SECOND LIKE YESTERDAY YA KNOW OMG PON1ES!
(sorry had to throw that in there as I find it to be somewhat amusing in a truly disgusting sort of way…)
Name: Core 2 Duo was a bad choice considering they already had the core duo line, hence the logical name should have been core duo 2… oh well, I’ll like refer to them as E6YYY and X6YYY
Core is the name of the architecture. Solo/Duo is the number of cores per CPU.
For the first release of the architecture, you get “Core Solo” and “Core Duo”.
Hence, if it is the second release of the Core architecture, the name of the architecture should be Core 2.
Add in the number of cores per CPU, and you get “Core 2 Solo” and “Core 2 Duo”.
Where the stupid part comes in is that “Core Solo” and “Core Duo” are not actually based on the “Core” architecture. They are just re-branded Pentium-M CPUs. Intel should have left the Pentium-M as “Centrino” and “Centrino 2”, and never re-branded it as “Core”.
That way, the CPUs just released would be called “Core”, same as the architecture.
But, then again, when has Intel ever had a good naming scheme? They killed the only good one they had when they released the PentiumPro (considering that PentiumPro, Pentium-II, and Pentium-III were all the same CPU architecture).
Except that Yonah (Core Solo/Duo) != Pentium M.
Yonah is simply a revision of the Pentium M microarchitecture, like Dothan or Banias. The distinction is primarily for marketing purposes.
Yonah is just a revision of the Pentium-M, same as all those different codenames for the Pentium4 were revisions of the Pentium4, or the different codenames for the Athlon were different revisions of the Athlon.
The different CPU architectures are: Pentium4 -> Pentium-M -> Core (Core 2 being the first release).
For some reason, the “Core Duo” name has always seemed a bit silly to me. I think the reverse order of the words makes me think if anglophones trying to phonetically speak French. I can’t wait for the Intel Piece duh Gauteau.