“The architecture is called Core, processor family is Core 2, the product names are Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme. In the past we’ve talked about its architecture and even previewed its performance, but today is the real deal. We’ve all been waiting for this day, the day Intel lifts the last remaining curtain on the chip that is designed to re-take the performance crown from AMD, to return Intel to its days of glory,” Anand Lal Shimpi reports for AnandTech.
“What you see before you 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. 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. What you’re looking at is Conroe and today is its birthday,” Lal Shimpi reports.
“Intel’s new Core 2 lineup has basically made all previous Intel processors worthless. The performance of the new Core 2 CPUs is so much greater, with much lower power consumption, that owners of NetBurst based processors may want to dust off the old drill bits and make some neat looking keychains,” Lal Shimpi reports.
Lal Shimpi reports, “AMD won’t have an architectural update of the Athlon 64 X2 until sometime in 2007 or 2008, thus its only response to Intel’s Core 2 lineup today is to also reduce pricing.”
“Intel’s Core 2 Extreme X6800 didn’t lose a single benchmark in our comparison; not a single one. In many cases, the $183 Core 2 Duo E6300 actually outperformed Intel’s previous champ: the Pentium Extreme Edition 965. In one day, Intel has made its entire Pentium D lineup of processors obsolete,” Lal Shimpi reports. “Compared to AMD’s Athlon 64 X2 the situation gets a lot more competitive, but AMD still doesn’t stand a chance. The Core 2 Extreme X6800, Core 2 Duo E6700 and E6600 were pretty consistently in the top 3 or 4 spots in each benchmark, with the E6600 offering better performance than AMD’s FX-62 flagship in the vast majority of benchmarks.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Is anyone still questioning whether Apple picked the right horse?
Related articles:
RUMOR: Intel’s Woodcrest to power Apple’s next-gen high-performance Mac Pro desktops – July 11, 2006
Intel aims for 32 cores by 2010 – July 10, 2006
PC Mag: ‘Top Ten’ list of things to know about Intel’s new Core 2 Duo processors – July 07, 2006
RUMOR: Apple to unveil ‘Mac Pro’ with new enclosure design, Intel Core 2 Duo at WWDC next month – July 03, 2006
Report: Dell signs deal with AMD for millions of chips for full range of desktops, notebooks – June 26, 2006
Independent benchmarks: Intel Core 2 Duo (Conroe) 2.67 GHz – June 22, 2006
Apple chose well: Intel poised to take massive lead across the board over AMD – June 07, 2006
Horses go back and forth…
Trevor,
AMD has no answer for the foreseeable future and even the answers they hope to have are weak.
No wonder Dell signed with AMD: Cut-rate Dell cares more about their price per chip than performance for their misinformed customers.
All i know is that I am still using my Powerbook 1.67 for a little while longer. By the time I am ready for a Macbook Pro they will be so fast and power efficient, and hopefully will have Blue-ray as well =P It will be worth the wait thats for sure.
Yep. Jobs chose Intel for good reasons. We don’t ever expect less of him.
Fred, I’m not saying Intel was the wrong choice, I’m just saying that it’s a constant race. No one is ahead forever.
Fine. Faster, compared to other little-endian I86 architecture chips, but how about compared to a Dual-core G5?!! Let’s see a series of FFT benchmarks…
“Is anyone still questioning whether Apple picked the right horse?”
Not me – once the bad taste wore off.
This is great news – but I can’t believe AMD will wait until 2008 to come back with something…
I can’t get my hands on one of these for at least a year, maybe two … unless I win the lottery. “My” first MacIntel is likely o be my wife’s iMac upgrade (from a G4). And, after that, our G4 iBook to a 13″ MacBook (I’ve only been touting that screen size for two or three years now). Maybe THEN I’ll be able to justify updating my tower – which will still be more computer than I need – even then. (Drool … Slobber) I wants. I WANTS!
Yes. Some of us are still questioning it.
Where’s Odyssey67 when you need him?
Just sayin.
It’s also gratifying for me to see the older Intel processors called crappy. The PowerPC chips are good chips overall– too bad they have been seemingly abandoned for Cell. Boy, does it look like that was a really bad decision…
Let’s not forget that Apple had quite a bit of technology and design input into the PowerPC family, technology that Apple kept when it started working with Intel. I’m sure Intel pursued Apple so hard because Intel needed Apple’s technology to create fast, low-power chips, and Apple needed Intel’s dedicated desktop/laptop production capabilities.
Intel is benefiting from Apple’s processor technology, and Apple is benefiting from Intel’s production dedication to desktop/laptop computers. While some may not like the fact that it’s Intel, the reality is that there isn’t a better match for Apple out there.
“Horses go back and forth…”
Thankfully, Trevor is right. Without competition from AMD, Intel might still be pushing overclocked Pentiums.
Loyal is as loyal does.
The facts are:
If Apple was still PowerPC, we would have received rev’s to the lineup, but over the past year, since Intel was announced, Apple quit rev-ing any PPC products.
Let us assume IBM had produced for Apple another generation of Power chips, call it a “G6.”
What would we Mac folks be saying about Intel? We’d be saying “Oh that’s nice, AMD and Intel are battling it out for second place. When Intel and AMD get a real challenger for AltiVech I’ll start listening, bla, bla, bla…”
This is the kind of commentary we would be seeing today.
Due to Apple and IBM no longer continuing development together on a kick butt desktop/server solution, the current G5 is languishing, and yes the Conroe processor now takes first place – for native application use.
But Conroe is not for the Mac Pro. Expect Apple to go right to the top with Woodcrest for its upcoming Mac Pro lineup.
R –
And speaking of Cell…
Good reasons indeed.
Where’s Odyssey67 when you need him?
I presume in his tinfoil-lined shack, hiding out from the dread DRM menace, preparing his next lengthy manifesto to be unleashed upon MDN.
I hear “lisa” came over to join him, and the two are having a good cry.
What’s the scoop about whether the Core 2 Duo’s will fit into the Core Duo slots in the existing MacBooks?
> Due to Apple and IBM no longer continuing development together on a kick butt desktop/server solution, the current G5 is languishing…
The “G5” (PowerPC 970 series) was languishing long before Apple moved on to Intel chips. It never reached the 3 GHz mark that Jobs believed would be achieved within a year after the first 2 GHz Power Mac G5 was release. There was never a G5 equivalent for use in PowerBooks. It is unlikely that we would be getting a Power Mac “G6” next month if Apple had stuck it out with IBM and PowerPC.
As much as I would have liked to see Apple succeed with “PowerPC inside,” it is crystal clear that going Intel was the right choice. I’m excited to hear how great these “Conroe” chips are, because they will probably end up in the next iMac revision (probably my next new Mac).
What really stinks is that these core 2 chips will be in new macs with the ‘trusted computing’ bs. I really detest this as someother entity is asserting a level of control over my computer.
And is it me or does it always seems like there is always 1 bad thing with new apple computers? Example; the new mac minis have cheap integrated graphics (as well as (I presume) the trused computing bs).
Mark
steven,
sorry wheres the G6? theres still no sign of it, and as far as portables go, we’d still have to be using motorola G4’s!!!!!!!
Loyal is as loyal does.
The facts are:
If Apple was still PowerPC, we would have received rev’s to the lineup, but over the past year, since Intel was announced, Apple quit rev-ing any PPC products.
Let us assume IBM had produced for Apple another generation of Power chips, call it a “G6.”
What would we Mac folks be saying about Intel? We’d be saying “Oh that’s nice, AMD and Intel are battling it out for second place. When Intel and AMD get a real challenger for AltiVech I’ll start listening, bla, bla, bla…”
This is the kind of commentary we would be seeing today.
Due to Apple and IBM no longer continuing development together on a kick butt desktop/server solution, the current G5 is languishing, and yes the Conroe processor now takes first place – for native application use.
Well, ANOTHER fact is that Apple DID use PPC for the last 5 years with only minor and lucklustre updates, specially regarding the laptop/desktop processors. The only real updates where for the Powermacs (quad g5, etc). A laptop G5 was nowhere near sight, and the dual core G4s are a joke and a stop gap compared to Core 2 Duo. Hell, don’t you read the benchmarks where a sole Core (1) Duo is better than a dual core G5 and even touches near quad G5 penformance in some tests? Well, Core 2 Duo is even better.
And the MOST IMPORTANT thing you people forget: the bloody CEO of Freescale admitted in an interview a while ago, that one reason Jobs choose Intel was that they [freescale] wasn’t really interested in desktop computing and IBM wasn’t seeing Apple as a large customer. And he was the guy that “sold” Jobs the powerpc G5 architeture.
Guys, the G6 was nowhere in sight, the entire line was languishing and SJ looked like an idiot for promising the 3 Ghz that the G5s never got close to. Heating was an issue with the G4s, but especially with the G5s. They had no choice but to go with someone else besides Freescale or IBM. Intel or AMD? I wouldn’t have cared which, myself. But they couldn’t keep doing what they were doing.
Horse races don’t always go back and forth – and also there is this thing called a Finish Line… In other words, sometimes there is a Winner.
Not only was the “G6” nowhere in sight, IBM flatly told Apple that they would not be investing resources to build a low-power, low heat version of the G5.
Given that choice, Apple’s only real choice was to move to Intel.
Lucky for us, Steve Jobs had the foresight to keep the Intel version of OS X as an ace up the sleeve for the last 6 years. IBM probably thought it had Apple in a corner but surprise, surprise Apple comes up with a scheme that more or less allows everyone to migrate completely[/b[ away from the PowerPC platform in only a year’s time (and more or less tranparently).
If Apple hadn’t moved to Intel, we’d be still looking at 1.67 GHz PowerBook G4s today.
PowerPC was once a great chip. Sadly, IBM decided making console chips was the future and let a great chip fade into the sunset. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Steve Jobs had a hand in Intel’s decision to develop the Core microarchitecture, which is a completely different from the again Pentium NetBurst architecture. No doubt it was Intel’s future plans for Core that convinced Jobs to announce the decision when he did last year.