Lemak Lemang

Core 2 Duo: Intel's farewell to Pentium

Aug 24, 2006 06:51

It might be frivolous to ask this question. But is there such a thing as the "World’s Best Processor"?

Intel believes it has cracked the code and come up with a new product line that can retire Pentium for good--a total of 10 Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme processors that are touted to deliver record-breaking performance of 40 percent up, and reduced power consumption of 40 percent down. At its core is Intel's leading 65-nanometer silicon process technology that we have heard so much of.

Picture courtesy Intel Malaysia

In layman's terms, that’s 291 million transistors consuming 40 percent less power than the previous breeds. In the not-too-recent past, 1971 to be exact, Intel's 4004 microprocessor had only 2,300 transistors, running at 108KHz.

In the 1993 major breakthrough when Pentium was born, the post-486 processor could incorporate "real world" data such as speech, sound, handwriting and photographic images. It contained 3.1 million transistors running at 60~66MHz.


The previous one I acquired last year to run one of my Linux servers was a Pentium D. I must say I had lots of nightmares with heat dispersal.

So a new processor cycle has begun commercially at Intel. The sweet thing is the chipmaker has chosen to unveil the Core 2 Duo in conjunction with the 25th anniversary of the PC coming into being.

To set the tone, Intel Malaysia recently flew in its Canada-based director for Digital Home Brand Management of Intel's Sales and Marketing Group, Charlotte Lamprecht, to conduct a media preview one week after the official release in the US.


Charlotte Lamprecht... LensaPress picture by Jeff Ooi

To illustrate the strenuous demand for peak performance and efficient power consumption, Intel roped in Albert Lim, Malaysia's 2005 World Cyber Games (WCG) Champion, to give a personal testimony.


Albert Lim... LensaPress picture by Jeff Ooi

During the preview when rival AMD was referred to as the affable "Green Monster", the consistent key message was on performance and efficiency on power consumption. The battle zone won't be on buzzwords like Gigahertz; it will be replaced by mantras like "instruction per clock" and "performance per watt". Hyper-Threading (HT) technology may also go away indefinitely. Most importantly are product positioning and price point. The range is targeted at the consumer (think Viiv), business desktop (think VPro), laptop PCs (think Centrino Duo) and workstations, not forgetting "enthusiast users" a.k.a. gamers.


Tapping the performance of dual processors to record and process a karaoke video clip... LensaPress picture by Jeff Ooi

Besides, the new line will extend its support for 64-bit computing to notebook PCs, and is ready to run Microsoft Windows Vista Premium.

The mumbo jumbo aside, I was more interested in knowing the support that Core 2 Duo has obtained in customer system designs. I wanted to see if Microsoft's Media Center was running ready on this new processor family. I was really taken in by the Media Center when it first launched and have been looking forward to it since my personal preview in Las Vegas in March, and again in Singapore in June this year.

Well, during the August 3 media launch, I barely saw a prototype of the Media Center from Dell Malaysia, although Intel claimed that it had garnered 550 customer system designs by the time of the launch.


Andrew Tang, Dell Malaysia product marketing manager in charge of the Media Center... LensaPress picture by Jeff Ooi

Another cliffhanger before the Christmas shopping season?

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