Intel announced its line of Core 2 Duo desktop CPUs today. If you're buying a new computer or you're building one of your own, you would be wise to see that it has one of Intel's new dual-core chips in it. The Core 2 Duo chips include not only the fastest desktop chips on the market, but also the most cost-effective and among the most power-efficient. About the only people these new chips aren't good news for are the folks at AMD, who can claim the desktop CPU crown no longer. We've given the full review treatment to two the five Core 2 Duo chips. You can read about the price-performance champ, the Core 2 Duo E6700 here and the entire Core 2 Duo series
The Core 2 Duo represents a new era for Intel. It's the first desktop chip family that doesn't use the NetBurst architecture, which has been the template for every design since the Pentium 4. Instead, the Core 2 Duo uses what's called the Core architecture (not to be confused with Intel's Core Duo and Core Solo laptop chips, released this past January). The advances in the Core architecture explain why even though the Core 2 Duo chips have lower clock speeds, they're faster than the older dual-core Pentium D 900 series chips. The Core 2 Extreme X6800 chip, the Core 2 Duo E6700, and the Core 2 E6600 represent the top tier of Intel's new line, and in addition to the broader Core architecture similarities, they all have 4MB of unified L2 cache. The lower end of the Core 2 Duo line, comprised of the $224 E6400 and the $183 E6300, has a 2MB unified L2 cache.
We won't belabor each point here since the blog post already spells it out, but the key is that it's not simply one feature that gives the Core 2 Duo chips their strength, but rather a host of design improvements across the chip and the way it transports data that improves performance. And our test results bear this out.
The Core 2 Extreme X6800 made a clean sweep of all of our benchmarks. AMD's closest competition, the 2.6GHz Athlon 64 FX-62, came within 5 percent on our iTunes, multitasking, and Microsoft Office tests, but on our Half-Life 2 and our Adobe Photoshop CS2 tests, AMD lost badly, by as much as 28 percent on Half-Life 2. At, Intel's new flagship processor might not be as compelling a deal as the only slightly slower Core 2 Duo E6700, but for enthusiasts and others with the passion and the wallet to ensure that they have the fastest chip out there, the Core 2 Extreme X6800 is now it.
But there's even more to the Core 2 Duo story than performance. One of the key elements of the new chips is their power efficiency. We base our findings on a number called the thermal design power (TDP), which is the number that AMD and Intel each provide to system vendors and various PC hardware makers for determining how much power each chip will require, and thus the amount of heat they'll need to dissipate. On Intel's last generation of dual-core desktop chips, the Pentium D 900s, the TDP rating fell between 95 and 130 watts. But because the Core 2 Duo design incorporates power management techniques from Intel's notebook chips, its power requirements are much more forgiving. All but the Core 2 Extreme X6800 have a TDP of 65 watts, while the Extreme chip itself is only 75 watts.
For AMD, the outlook isn't great at the moment. Its so-called 4x4 design, which will let you run two Athlon 64 FX-62 chips in a single PC, might overtake a single Core 2 Extreme X6800 on raw performance. AMD says it's going to drop prices this month to compete on price-performance ratio. That might make for some compelling desktop deals, but for now Intel boasts the superior technology.
