Intel Core 2 Duo, Conroe rocks, dominates in games

First INQpressions Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 vs Athlon FX62

INTEL has been a high-end underdog for a while.
AMD has owned that market for years but now the magical Conroe CPU is here and Intel finally has some ammunition to fight. Intel ditched the rotten Pentium 4 Netburst marchitecture and embraced Pentium M marchitecture.
It managed to make the Pentium M core even more efficient by some thirty per cent and that's how we got Conroe and Merom CPUs. Conroe finally got its commercial name Core 2 Duo and is the fastest Intel marchitecture that money can buy today.

Intel Core 2 Duo or Conroe, as we like to call it, has two independent cores each having 2MB of cache. It is manufactured on 65 nanometre marchitecture and the production is ramping up. Intel now can get enough of the CPUs to satisfy demand. The chip has fourteen pipelines stages compared to thirty one on the Pentium 4 EE CPU.
The one we tested works at 2.67GHz and it is branded as Intel Core 2 Duo E6700. Each core works at 2.67GHz and the CPU uses 266MHz FSB.

The CPU officially supports DDR 2 memory up to 800MHz and if you overclock you can get even 1200MHz memory to work on it. The CPU has two times 64KB of L1 cache that it uses for data or instructions - much more compared to Pentium 4 EE which had only 28KB. AMD's Athlon FX has twice as much, totally 128KB of cache memory and uses 64KB for data and 64 for instructions.
The Core 2 Duo supports X86, x86-64, and all SSEs from one to SSE4. This is the first Intel Pentium M based CPU that fully supports 64-bit computing.