Could it finally be Intel's day to shine?

For over 6 years now, Intel has put all of its research and money behind its Pentium line of CPU's and until the last 3 yeas, it has been an up and down ride taking on the new CPU giant AMD, who's Athlon series of processors has partly been the bane of Intel's existence.

K7 and K8 architectures was something Intel probably wished never saw the light of day, especially when it came to Pentium 4's somewhat weaker architecture. All of Intel's processors since the Pentium 4 were introduced using the Netburst Micro Architecture. This architecture was designed for speed, raw CPU MHz. Its extremely long pipeline and twin double speed ALU's allowed speeds hitting 3.8GHz and if things continued, maybe more. Only problem is, clock for clock. AMD's K8 architecture managed to destroy the Pentium 4 architecture, and power per watt, AMD's CPU are like an arctic winter compared to the Netburst CPU's especially the Prescott and Presler based units.

Today marks a big change for Intel. It's the first time since the early 90's that its new top market CPU has not carried the Pentium logo - in fact, Pentium branding is now set to die a slow death with the Pentium D to be the last CPU's from Intel to continue production for a few more month, then we will see only new processors based on Intel's latest architecture, named "Core Architecture"

So far Intel has already released one CPU series based on this new architecture. Core Duo and Core Solo for the mobile sectors have already emerged; today we are looking at Core 2 series for the desktop section. In our labs we have Intel's twin Core 2 components, the Core 2 Extreme (X6800) and the Core 2 Duo (E6700).