We previewed the Intel Core 2 CPU a couple of weeks ago and knew right away that Intel was once again back in the game however, today is the day that the NDA is lifted on these CPUs. Lets talk a bit about what makes them different from Intel’s current line up- the Pentium D CPUs based on Intel’s netburst architecture.

When Intel originally launched the Pentium 4, one of its key features was the ability to ramp up clock speeds tremendously. However, as time progressed and as the Pentium 4 moved between the Willamette to Northwood to Prescott cores, it became inefficient with its extremely long staged pipeline. Besides being inefficient, the CPU was also plagued with producing a lot of heat and consuming a lot of power. On the other hand, AMD’s Athlon64 line of CPUs were performing very well along with consuming lesser power and running cooler. These factors attributed to the success of AMD’s CPU and its preference over Intel CPUs- especially in the enthusiast and gaming community.

Intel thus had a tremendous challenge on their hands. Not only did they have to produce a CPU that performed well along with consuming lesser power and running cooler, but it had to be done with a gap that was big enough to convince the switchers to return to Intel without thinking twice. That, is the job of Intel’s Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme CPUs.

These Core 2 CPUs are based on the Core Duo architecture that Intel introduced in notebooks earlier this year. In fact, the Core Duo is roughly based on Intel’s Centrino line of mobile CPUs which were somewhat based off the Pentium III CPU. Manufactured on a 65nm fabrication process, the following are the key new features that Intel brings with the Core 2 CPU:

Intel® Wide Dynamic Execution: Improves execution speed and efficiency, delivering more instructions per clock cycle. Each core can complete up to four full instructions simultaneously.

Intel® Smart Memory Access: Optimizes the use of the data bandwidth from the memory subsystem to accelerate out-of-order execution. A newly designed prediction mechanism reduces the time in-flight instructions have to wait for data. New pre-fetch algorithms move data from system memory into fast L2 cache in advance of execution. These functions keep the pipeline full, improving instruction throughput and performance.

Intel® Advanced Smart Cache: The shared L2 cache is dynamically allocated to each processor core based on workload. This efficient, dual-core optimized implementation increases the probability that each core can access data from fast L2 cache, significantly reducing latency to frequently used data and improving performance.

Intel® Advanced Digital Media Boost: Accelerates the execution of Streaming SIMD Extension (SSE) instructions to significantly improve the performance on a broad range of applications, including video, audio, image and photo processing, multi-media, encryption, financial, engineering and scientific applications. The 128-bit SSE instructions are now issued at a throughput rate of one per clock cycle effectively doubling their speed of execution on a per clock basis over previous generation processors.

Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel® VT): Intel® VT allows one hardware platform to function as multiple “virtual” platforms. For businesses, Intel VT offers improved manageability, limiting downtime and maintaining worker productivity by isolating computing activities into separate partitions.