intel's Big Strike

While not shipping to vendors yet, intel's newest Core 2 Duo chip is making quite the waves all over the industry. Unfortunately, as this is not a hardware review site, I haven't had hands-on experience with one yet, but what I've read backs up everything I've ever said. Everyone in the industry is claiming a revolution in processing power.

A lot of people asked me if this chip was worth waiting for, and honestly, I think it might just be in certain groups. Fact is, under normal circumstances, the Core 2 is not all that much faster than the latest AMD offerings, maybe 5 to 10 percent. However, once the variables of over-clocking come into play, this thing is killer.

The Core 2 to get is the E6600 chip. This is the least expensive chip with the full 4MB of cache on board. At stock speeds, this chip runs at 2.4ghz, on a 266mhz system bus. The fastest of the Core 2 line currently is the X6800, running a cool 2.93ghz on the same bus. For a quick reference, CPU speed is derived by multiplying the bus frequency by a number. In the case of the X6800, that number is 11, and the E6600's is 9. To get the $319 E6600 to the $999 X6800's speed, you'll simply need to get the bus to go faster. For 3ghz, you'll need a 333mhz bus, which is exactly what intel's 975x chipset was designed to push.

Reports on the web show that bus speeds on some motherboards are in the 450mhz range, giving an impressive 4ghz with this little chip. Interestingly enough, this little guy can run up there with a little more voltage and proper cooling. At 4ghz, there's nothing even close to this chip.

So what this means for the consumer is that there will be enthusiast companies putting out super-clocked machines that can obliterate the competition. It also means there's a lot of headroom for the X6900 and beyond. It will be very easy for intel to ship faster chips when they need to.

Cheers to intel for finally pushing the processor market forward.