Discovery

Core 2 is an eighth-generation x86 architecture microprocessor produced by Intel. Core 2 was to mark the retirement of Intel’s Pentium brand name that had been used since 1993. Core 2 saw the reunion of Intel’s notebook and desktop product lines, which had diverged with the Pentium M and Pentium 4 in 2003.

Like the Intel Core brand that it supersedes, Intel currently offers the Core 2 series processor in

• Duo (two-core),
• Quad (four-core), and
• Extreme (two- or four-core with extra cache and higher speed) models.

The base processors are code-named “Conroe” (for desktop use) and “Merom” (for portable use).

Intel® Core™2 Duo processors feature Intel® Core™ microarchitecture, a revolutionary blueprint that takes these Intel® processors and products to extraordinary levels of performance and power efficiency.

The first Intel Core 2 Duo processor cores, code-named Conroe and given the Intel product code 80557, were launched on July 27, 2006 at Fragapalooza, a yearly gaming event in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. These processors are built on a 65 nm process and are intended for desktops, replacing the Pentium 4 and Pentium D.

Let’s start with a look at what’s on offer and why we should consider moving to the Core 2 Duo platform. Intel is touting Core 2 Duo as a power-efficient processor that also offers better performance than the Pentium 4 and Pentium D chips. Unlike NetBurst-based processors, such as the Pentium 4 and Pentium D, Core 2 Duo does not stress designs based on extremely high clock speeds but rather improvements in the processor’s usage of both available clock cycles and power. This translates into more efficient decoding stages, execution units, caches, and buses, as well as many other factors. The CPU-family may also have more than one core on a single chip. The power consumption of these processors is much lower than the Pentium desktop line of products. With a TDP of only 65 W, Core 2 Duo features a significantly reduced power consumption compared to its predecessor desktop chip, the Pentium 4 Prescott with a TDP of 130 W.

One of the most important features is what Intel refers to as Wide Dynamic Execution, which allows for more data to be processed per clock cycle compared to previous generation of products. The Core 2 Duo processors can processes four full instructions per clock cycle, compared to the NetBurst architecture’s three. A part of this is a technqiue Intel refers to as “macrofusion” which enables common pairs of instructions to be combined into a single instruction. Smart Memory Access has been designed to lower memory latency and improve data access. The key to this is “memory disambiguation”, which allows the execution cores to pre-load instructions that are about to be executed before the previous instruction has finished. It means that in most cases the processor will spend less time idling and more time processing data. A better memory pre-fetch system, with twin pre-fetches in both the L1 and L2 cache, should also improve the rate at which the correct data is being made available for the cores to process. The result: certain types of data can be processed in less time than it took on previous generations of Intel processors.

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