Intel Launches Core2 Duo

Intel officially announced the introduction of 10 Core 2 Duo and Core Extreme microprocessors for desktops, workstations and notebooks. Intel said it has over 550 customer system designs underway, with the CPUs built on 65 nanometre technology. Machines using the desktop chips will be available in early August, while notebooks will become available at the end of that month.

Five of the family are aimed for desktops, five for notebook and mobile users. The products were formally codenamed "Cointreau" 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. The mobile chips have a better version of Speedstep, a method for powering down the processor to increase battery life, and other power saving devices.

Conroe chip is about 40% faster than the Pentium D while consuming 40% less power. The Merom chips are about 20% faster than the older Core Duo laptop chips at the same power level. 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).

Intel has established the price for the desktop processors from about $180 to $1000 for 1,000-unit quantities. However, the price for the notebook processors remains to be specified at the end of August.

Wow good for intel. Im sure AMD will be comming up with something very soon to top it lol.

hmm.. i doubt that duo cores actually live for long, since quadcores are raising fast.
And im a simple man of AMD, i like my processor fast, and my comps cheap. So i dont buy intel, but.. lately intel has been getting great results with these multicore processors.
Im hoping that AMD would finally learn how to build good multicores, they spend too much time with those singelcore processors, i remember going to pc store few years ago and they tried to sell my some new intel processor that had core2, or something like that.
I just hope that amd doesnt leave too much behind on this contest.
Well, one thing is sure. There is absolutely no point buying a new singlecore processor

The Mac Pro is on Quad Core as standard I think now, with Xeon woodchip processots 3.0GhZ.. what next? Intel Dual-Quad?

well, i bet that it wont take long to have something like hexa-core with this pace