Santa Clara, California-based Intel also released pricing information for its new chip, formerly codenamed Conroe, which undercuts AMD’s, at least for now.
On Friday, non-disclosure agreements with independent testers were lifted. The consensus among reviewers was that Intel had indeed delivered on its promise of faster CPUs that use substantially less power.
This is a turnaround for Intel, whose Pentium D line had trailed AMD’s Athlon 64 FX and X2 dual core products, so much so that Intel was forced to dramatically cut its Pentium D prices to drum up buyers.
Well, those days will soon be just a bad memory, and with the debut of the Core 2 architecture, Intel is moving in an entirely new direction by combining ultra high performance and attractive pricing with industry-leading power and heat specifications, said reviewer Vince Freeman on SharkyExtreme.com.
This is the real deal, and we cannot remember a processor that arrived with such intense fanfare and extremely high expectations.
For the average business user, however, the performance difference between AMD’s and Intel’s processors likely won’t be felt. High-end gaming and multimedia applications are more affected by such beefed-up processing power than more common, corporate applications.
Intel’s upcoming chip line up is based on its new Core microarchitecture, which was built to be both low-powered and high-performance. In the past, the chipmaker had mostly pushed performance alone.
Earlier this year, Intel touted the Core architecture as enabling a 20% performance lead over counterpart chips from AMD. While that proved not to always be the case with some independent research results, it was with others.
Overall, however, Core 2 Duo had a clear performance lead, based on dozens of online benchmark results.
Make no mistake, [Core 2 Duo] is not the power hungry, poor performing, non-competitive garbage (sorry guys, it’s the truth) that Intel has been shoving down our throats for the greater part of the past 5 years, said Anand Shimpi, chief executive of hardware analysis outfit AnandTech, in comparison to Intel’s current Pentium D chip.
No, you’re instead looking at the most impressive piece of silicon the world has ever seen, at the fastest desktop processor we’ve ever tested, he said of Intel’s Core 2 Extreme X6800.
The Extreme X6800 version does have the fastest clock speed, and is the most expensive, of the Core 2 Duo line-up Intel has planned for formal release on July 27.
The other two forthcoming chips that seemed to mostly have been benchmarked by testers were the Core 2 Duo E6700 and the E6600.
Intel’s Core 2 Duo prices will, for now, be cheaper than AMD’s. For example, the 2.67-GHz E6700 will be priced at $530 versus the 2.6-GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+, which is currently priced at $696.
But AMD said, in a statement, that it would perform an aggressive price in July to ensure we maintain price-performance leadership in desktop products. However, Intel had previously said it too plans to lower Pentium D prices even further once Core 2 Duo chips begin to ship.
