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| Intel Core 2 Duo Blinded by the light | |
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(Review by MS, July 25, 2006) |
Final Thoughts
At its introduction, each generation of CPU generates a huge splash, the one notable exception was - and that may be a personal preference - the Pentium4 that caused lots of discussions and speculations about the technical merits of the branch prediction units along with a lot of other hot wind but in the end turned out to be a power-hungry, hot piece of silicon and not much else.
Where AMD had one big triumph with the K7 and then later with the K8, such a thing was missing from Intel's processor launches that, coincidentally, happened mostly on days when everybody else was having a lot of fun watching Superbowl events.
The Core 2 Duo dual core processor launch finally puts the word fun back into the release of a new architecture and that appears to be what Intel needed more than anything else. In terms of performance, the Core 2 processors swept every single benchmark with the exception of the OpenGL Hardware Rendering task of Cinebench 2003 -which arguably taxes the memory system more than the CPU - and even there, we might be looking at some freak accident rather than a representative result for the E6700.
I mentioned it already in the benchmark section but if there was one single graph that shows the difference between Intel yesterday and Intel today, that graph would be the score/W graph of the CPU benchmark in 3DMark 2005. We are not talking about 10% improvement, not 20% or even 50% either but rather a whopping 560% increase in processor efficiency - compared to the worst contender in the mix, namely the Smithfield family with the D820 and EE840 being representatives. The worst part of this is that we can't even say that these processors were bad but, compared to the new lineup, they are just completely below par.
At this point, it goes without saying that Intel has regained the crown in the desktop processor segment, AMD is still not out of the picture but it is clear that there is a need for a new design. It won't be the K9, that's almost certain but rumor has it that the K10 is not that far out.
Is the Core 2 Duo worth throwing away the existing system? That is one of the questions that we were trying to answer by keeping some of the older, "obsolete" system configurations in the listing, most of which will still work perfectly fine, especially in gaming situations where the graphics cards are more important than anything else. With respect to semiconductors, silicone sisters aside, the Core 2 Duo is definitely where the fun is - cause she was blinded by the light…at the end of the tunnel
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Intel Core Duo T2600 (dual core) |
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