Processor chases the need for speed....

[KiwiCoromandel]

Intel promises a new era of 'green computing' with the launch today of its Core 2 Duo processors.

The launch signals the end of the Pentium years, in which manufacturers and consumers alike were consumed by the "need for speed", said Philip Cronin, general manager of Intel in Australia and New Zealand.

"The critical elements for the future are going to be power efficiency, low-emission manufacturing and other green elements, as much as pure performance," Mr Cronin says.

However he also boasts that the new Core 2 Duo processors are the most powerful in the desktop market.

The earliest Pentiums were released in 1993 with clock speeds of 60 and 66MHz. More recent Pentium 4 chips reached up to 3.8GHz, or 3,800 million instructions per second.

However such processors put out enormous amounts of heat and drained a lot of power.

"With clock speeds getting fast we were really heading into high temperature output," Mr Cronin said. "Often hidden is the sheer cost of electricity to run [a desktop computer]."

Since 2004, Intel and its competitors have concentrated on putting two computing cores on one chip, known as 'dual core' technology.

By sharing the computing load the two cores can do more work with less electricity.

They are also better able to manage the more complex contemporary computer user, who is used to multitasking several programs such as videoconferencing, word processing, web browsing, virus scanning and background downloads.

Intel's earliest dual-core chips were modified Pentiums whose performance was considered inferior to the processors of rival AMD.

However Core 2 Duo's radical redesign has won praise, with reviewers hailing it as the fastest on the market in pure performance terms.

"Early customer feedback is that this product rocks - which I believe is a technical term," Mr Cronin says. Its lower heat output also means it can be packaged in a more attractive, slim form factor computer box.

The Core 2 Duo will also come in a mobile computing version for the burgeoning laptop market.

The future is 'quad core' - Intel is already planning a four-core chip for its server line later this year.

source:AP

[DudeAsInCool]

I'm hoping I can add the new chip to my IMac--it will be interesting to see what Apple announced next month