The launch event this past July for Intel's next-generation CPU family, Core 2 Duo, was (as expected) filled with speeches and demos showing how much faster the new chip architecture was compared to the preceding Core Duo parts. And (as not entirely expected) the Core 2 Duo and high-end Core 2 Extreme desktop offerings have actually lived up to the hype, delivering excellent performance in synthetic and real-world tests alike.
But while desktop buyers have snatched up every available Core 2 system, laptop buyers had to wait to see how well Core 2 Duo would perform in a mobile platform, as sample units were not available until mid-August (manufacturers should have chips in quantity for September sales). We got our hands on the first Core 2 Duo-based laptops, and we're pleased to report that the new CPU does indeed make good on the claims Intel put forward, making Core 2 Duo far and away the most powerful mobile processor available today.
Dual-core Encore
The Core 2 Duo architecture follows closely on the heels of Intel's first mobile dual-core offering, the Core Duo, which launched this past winter. As the name implies, these chips squeeze two independent computing engines (or "cores") onto a single CPU to improve overall performance. That tack is a departure from the cycle of ever-increasing clock speeds that had been the road to faster performance since the CPU's inception. The reason for the strategy shift: Faster-clocked processors by their nature run hotter and require more energy than do slower-clocked chips-a double-whammy for mobile designs, where most of the growth in the PC industry is coming from for the foreseeable future.
The Core 2 Duo architecture follows closely on the heels of Intel's first mobile dual-core offering, the Core Duo, which launched this past winter. As the name implies, these chips squeeze two independent computing engines (or "cores") onto a single CPU to improve overall performance. That tack is a departure from the cycle of ever-increasing clock speeds that had been the road to faster performance since the CPU's inception. The reason for the strategy shift: Faster-clocked processors by their nature run hotter and require more energy than do slower-clocked chips-a double-whammy for mobile designs, where most of the growth in the PC industry is coming from for the foreseeable future.
Enter dual-core technology, which in essence packs two CPUs onto a single piece of silicon. That said, a dual-core chip doesn't offer twice the performance on a given application; instead, it handles two simultaneous tasks far better than a single-core chip can. So if all you are doing is word processing, you won't notice a difference between a dual-core laptop and one equipped with, say, an Intel Core Solo processor.
But start an anti-virus scan in the background and then switch to a computational-intensive task such as gaming or video-editing, and the benefits of a dual-core CPU become evident. Also, certain high-end applications (Adobe Photoshop most famous among them) are true multithreaded apps, meaning they can take advantage of a dual-core processor if it is present.
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