Intel Core 2 Duo Makes Its Official Debut (AMD Killer?)

Today is THE day: Intel officially launches its long awaited and highly praised dual-core processors, known under the Core 2 Duo brand.

The giant chip maker announced the world-wide availability of Core 2 Duo for desktops, notebooks and servers.

Obviously the new Core Microarchitecture has attracted a lot of positive reviews and every tech site has reported staggering results for Core 2 Duo processors, even for the entry-level ones- a motive for Intel to transform this day into a Doom’s Day for AMD.

Not a very pleasant situation for the Texas-based Advanced Micro Devices. Despite the fact that until now AMD dominated the desktop and especially the server market, with its Athlon64, Athlon FX and Opteron processors, everyone’s preoccupation now is how to praise Intel’s Core Microarchitecture, the basis for Core 2 Duo. The 180-degrees turn in public’s opinion is apparently justified by the astounding results that Intel pulls out in the majority of tests, but it can also be attributed to Intel’s PR machine.

AMD has been lagging behind Intel at this chapter and many IT analysts agree with the fact that although AMD’s performance in 32-bit and 64-bit has been superior to Intel’s for at least two years, the lack/the bad management of PR has deprived them of an even greater market share and, of course, of more money.

As for Intel, they are preparing not less than 550 customer system designs using the 65 nano-meter built CPUs.

At least five CPUs are destined for the desktop segment, and other five are for the notebook segment. The code-names for these categories were “Conroe” and “Merom”.

The chips support 64-32 instructions, so called smart cache which shares L2 cache, wide dynamic execution, and instructions that speed up multimedia transactions.

Of course, the mobile processors beneficiate from new features which allow power saving options, and also an improved version of Speedstep, a method for powering down the processor to increase battery life.

According to Intel, PCs equipped with the new processors will be available staring early August 2006, with notebooks coming soon after, by the end of the same month.

Tsuyoshi Abe, Intel's sales and marketing general manager, expects a tough fight ahead, but he was confident of winning with the new Core 2 Duo processor series which is planned to be used for over 550 desktop and laptop computers from makers including Dell, Fujitsu and Lenovo.

"The competition in the market will continue to heat up as every maker tries hard to improve its products, but I believe our new processors can help us beat our competitors," he told a news conference.

The "Cointreau" chips clock from 2.93GHz down to 1.86GHz, all using a 1066MHz system bus, and with L2 caches of 4MB for the higher clocked chips and 2MB for the lower clocked chips.

The "Merom" chips clock from 2.33GHz down to 1.66GHz with bus speeds of 667MHz and cache of either 4MB or 2MB for the two lowest SKUs (stock keeping units).

Core 2 Duo for desktops (Conroe), contains 291 million transistors and, according to Intel, increases the overall performance by 40 percent while using 40 percent less energy.
Kazumasa Yoshida, co-president of Intel's Japan unit, said the company also hoped its energy-efficient chips would boost the overall industry.

"Our business is slowing down in the second half, and we believe the most important task for us now is to lead the market with products like these," he said.
In June, another series of processors produced by Intel, this time for servers, made its debut: the Xeon 5100 series, previously named “Woodcrest” are now competing with AMD’s powerful Opterons.

Intel has established the price for the desktop processors from 21,230 yen ($182.5) to 115,900 yen ($996.3) in 1,000-unit quantities. However, the price for the notebook processors remains to be specified at the end of August.

Recently, Intel and AMD have both announced drastic price reductions in the near future for their processors and we should expect even more reductions by the end of this year.

The first to make a step in this direction was made by California-based AMD, following the threat posed by Intel’s Core 2 Duo processors. The positive reviews posted on every site during the last three weeks for Core 2 Duo, after the NDA (non-disclosure agreement) ceased for all testers, determined AMD to fight back with lower prices for its chips.

Both companies, which dominate the processor market, have blamed each other for the last week’s negative financial reports.

Despite the grim reports and the emergency measures (firing 1,000 administrative clerks worldwide to cut cost and enhance the interior communicative and decision-making power), Intel is confident it can recover the difference that AMD gained in the last two years on the server and desktop segment.

Extensive benchmark testing by Tom's Hardware's engineers showed that Core 2 Duo can be easily overclocked - the Tom's Hardware sample ran at a stable 3.46 GHz - instead of the regular 2.93 GHz. Performance jumps drastically in some scenarios: For example, the chip breaks the 3000-point barrier in the CPU test of 3DMark06 for the very first time, approaches 9000 points in the CPU test of PCMark05 and almost 32,000 points in the SiSoft Sandra 2007 CPU Test - 58% more than AMD's fastest processor at 2.8 GHz.

Anandtech, which was one of the sites that was granted access to a preproduction version of Conroe, declared earlier this month that "Intel's Core 2 Extreme X6800 didn't lose a single benchmark in our comparison; not a single one." Even Intel's mainstream E6700 and E6600 processors beat AMD's highest-performing chip, the Athlon FX-62, in several benchmarks. Needless to say what clients would think of buying first…

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I've been out of the PC/gamming rig building rat race for almost 5 years and it was news to me that AMD was making better processors and at a better price then Intel.. It seems like the tides might be turning though..