July 28, 2006 – Intel Corp. has unveield its new lineup of dual-core microprocessors in a sweeping launch not seen since its Pentium was unveiled six years ago.

The desktop version of the Core 2 Duo chips, all built with 65nm process technologies, provides a 40% increase in performance and is more than 40% more power-efficient than the company’s previously best-performing processor, the company claims. The product line includes five desktop PC processors and five chips for mobile applications. Intel claims it’s already shipping production-ready Core 2 Duo processors for all segments. Initial desktop systems incorporating high-end “Extreme” versions of the chip are now available, with notebooks due out at the end of August.

“Not since Intel introduced the Pentium processor has the industry seen the heart of the computer reinvented like this,” stated Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO, citing the Core 2 Duo desktop’s 40% power savings despite performance from 291 million transistors.

Features include up to four full instructions completed simultaneously; “smart memory access” that hides memory latency; a shared L2 cache or memory reservoir (one core utilizes the entire cache while the other is idle), to reduce power; and a boost in execution speed for instructions specifically targeting multimedia and graphics applications.

The mobile versions of the Core 2 Duo also offers power-savings features, such as coordinating Intel’s SpeedStep clock-speed-tweaking software and idle power-management state transitions independently per core; a “dynamic bus parking” process that powers down the chipset while the processor is in low-frequency (sleep) mode; and flushing cache data to system memory during periods of inactivity.