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Overview
On July
27th, Intel announced the Intel®
Core™2 Duo (C2D) and Intel® Core™2 Extreme
(C2E) processors, which are the new brand names for Intel's
next-generation of energy-efficient
performance oriented desktop processors. Formerly known by the
codename "Conroe," the Intel® Core™2 processors for desktop
computers are based on the Intel®
Core™ microarchitecture, Intel's new industry-leading foundation for
all mobile, desktop and server platforms moving forward. These processors
include two processing cores per chip, hence the “Duo” addition. These
ground-breaking processors are built on Intel’s advanced 65-nanometer
design and manufacturing process technology that shrinks a processor’s
circuitry and transistors. This combination will deliver
higher-performing, yet more energy-efficient processors that will spur
more capable, stylish, silent and smaller mobile and desktop PCs while
saving on electricity usage.
Intel is touting the C2D to deliver up to a 40% increase in performance
while consuming 40% less electricity when compared to the Pentium D 960
processor. To quote Intel CEO Paul Otellini, "The
Core™2 Duo processors are simply the best processors in the world. Not
since Intel introduced the Pentium® processor has the industry seen the
heart of the computer reinvented like this. This is not just an
incremental change; this is a revolutionary leap." Otellini also said that
with the debut of the C2D, Intel has definitely regained the performance
crown from AMD, and early reviews of the Core™ 2 Duo have been simply
stellar with performance gains as high as 70% over the AMD AM2 on
CPU-bound benchmark tests. Otellini also predicted that the "Core™
2 Duo is the growth engine for the next 500 million new internet users."
Brand
New and Improved
Starting with these two new Intel® Core™2 Duo and
Intel® Core™2 Extreme brands, the “2” designation signals the arrival of a
new generation of technology to the Intel® Core™ processor line. The first
"Core™" processor debuted in Q1 in the form of the Core™ Duo mobile
processors, but the Core™ 2 line adds a bevy of new features to enhance
performance and reduce power consumption. You will see these new mobile
Core™ 2 Duo processors code-named "Merom" starting to trickle into ASI
warehouses in the September timeframe. In order to be consistent with
current Intel Core™ processor naming, Intel will continue to use such terms
as “Duo” to effectively indicate the number of processing cores per
product. These two new brands will have new logos (can be seen below)
which are consistent with the new Intel brand and corporate identity
introduced earlier this year, yet visually distinctive in both design and
coloring, to help easily identify these powerful state-of-the-art products
as new and improved. These new dual-core processors for the desktop will
include the industry’s largest integrated cache called Intel® Advanced Smart Cache (either 4MB or 2MB) that
includes a unique design for faster performance on memory intensive
applications. These products will also support such features as enhanced
security, virtualization and manageability built right into the
processors. These
desktop Core™
2 Duo processors will mark the arrival of Intel's cleanest dual-core
design to date. Intel's existing 9XX and 8XX dual-core processors use two
distinct cores, which communicate with each other over the front-side bus.
In contrast, Conroe will have its two cores on the same silicon die
(monolithic design), enabling faster inter-processor communication and a
shared L2 cache to radically enhance performance.
 Core™2 Duo processors E6000 Family (E6300 -
E6700)
The basic Core™ 2 Duo family will consist of four processors: the
E6300, E6400, E6600, and E6700. They will run at clock speeds of 1.86 GHz,
2.13 GHz, 2.40 GHz, and 2.66 GHz, respectively. The E6300 and E6400 will
be equipped with a 2MB L2 cache; the other two models will have a 4MB L2
cache. Using Intel's 65 nm manufacturing technology, all come with a
1,066-MHz front-side bus, and will ack 291 million transistors onto a 143
square-millimeter slice of silicon.
ASI
SKU |
Processor
Number |
Clock
Speed |
Cache
Size L2 |
Front
Side Bus |
Dual
Core |
Intel®
VT |
Enhanced
Intel
SpeedStep®
Technology |
Intel®
EM64T |
Execute
Disable Bit |
sSpec# |
Package |
| 50171 |
E6700 |
2.66 GHz |
4MB |
1066MHz |
 |
|
|
|
|
SL9S7 |
LGA 775 |
| 50170 |
E6600 |
2.40 GHz |
4MB |
1066MHz |
|
|
|
|
|
SL9S8 |
LGA 775 |
| 50169 |
E6400 |
2.13 GHz |
2MB |
1066MHz |
|
|
|
|
|
SL9S9 |
LGA 775 |
| 50168 |
E6300 |
1.86 GHz |
2MB |
1066MHz |
|
|
|
|
|
SL9SA |
LGA 775 |
 Core™ 2 Extreme Edition
X6800
At the top of the line, the Core™ 2 Extreme processor is being aimed for gaming systems and graphics
workstations. It's designated as the X6800 with a clock speed of 2.93 GHz,
and gives you the ability to change the clock multiplier in able to push
the performance envelope even further. This is the first Intel processor to
officially have an un-locked clock multiplier where you can carefully overclock your system greater than the 11:1 stock clock multiplier ratio.
Later in Q4 the next C2E will
arrive as a quad-core desktop processor code-named "Kentsfield" and will
surely keep Intel the performance leader on the desktop.
ASI
SKU |
Processor
Number |
Clock
Speed |
Cache
Size
L2 |
Front
Side
Bus |
Dual
Core |
Intel®
VT |
Enhanced
Intel
SpeedStep®
Technology |
Intel®
EM64T |
Execute
Disable Bit |
sSpec# |
Package |
| 50918 |
X6800 |
2.93 GHz |
4MB |
1066MHz |
|
|
|
|
|
SL9S5 |
LGA 775 |
Intel Core™
Microarchitecture: Energy-Efficient
Performance
Back at Spring IDF in early March, Intel
announced their new Core™ micro-architecture, replacing the long-in-the-tooth
Netburst® architecture design, which
finally hit its thermal wall
so to speak. Netburst®
had a nice five year run but Intel could never get
past 3.8GHz due to the resulting excessive heat, which couldn't be
adequately dissipated by the cooling subsystem. Enter the Core™
micro-architecture, an evolutionary offshoot of the Pentium M mobile
processor design, which puts a major emphasis on lowering power consumption along
with Intel's
older priority of boosting performance. Intel had to radically move away
from its dependence on rising clock frequencies or "digital narcotics" as
we've jokingly called it, to achieve their performance gains. In the past
few years Intel added their "T's" or technologies to their processors,
like Hyper-Threading, XD, EM64T, EIST, & VT, to enhance performance
without raising the clock frequency. The last trick they had left was to
add a 2nd core to the mix to increase performance and lower the clock
speed, but excessive thermals again proved to be the roadblock of the
Netburst® architecture.
To confirm just how important it was for Intel to create such an
energy-efficient new processor architecture I think these comments made by
Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner at Spring IDF say it all. "Energy is on everyone's mind.
It's the next frontier. Not only has it become a critical concern in our
daily lives, it's become a critical concern in just about every platform
we have. The amount of energy required to execute a single instruction has
increased significantly, well over a factor of four over this time frame.
(~13 years)." In 2001 Netburst® (Pentium 4)
debuted and had about four times
the performance of the original Pentium (1993), but it consumed about 3.5
times the energy per
instruction. In 2003 Centrino Mobile Technology arrived with the Pentium M lineage of chips
and changed this trend and Intel's way of thinking for all future chip
generations. The Pentium M (Banias) consumed the same amount of
energy per instruction as the original
Pentium but has about 3 times the performance. The Core™ Duo, which came to
market in Q1 of this year, has four times the performance and even lower
per-instruction consumption than the Pentium M.
The Core™ micro-architecture utilizes a much
shorter 14-stage processing pipeline where the workload is divided up in
chunks. The Pentium 4 was designed with a very deep 31-stage pipeline. The
Pentium M and Core Duo have a slightly shorter 12-stage pipeline. The Core™ micro-architecture
is also "wider" with the ability to process four instructions per clock
cycle versus prior Intel and AMD generations that can only crunch 3
instructions at the same time. The new Core™ 2 Duos can also process a
single 128-bit SSE (Streaming SIMD [Single Instruction Multiple Data]
Extension instruction every clock cycle where Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 take
two clock cycles. Being able to process these SSE, SSE2 & SSE3
instructions faster substantially speeds up media encoding and transcoding
applications . The Core™ micro-architecture also is able to combine processor
micro-ops (decoded x86 instructions) and macro-ops (two combined x86
instructions) into one data item and sent through the pipeline in a single
cycle, thus effectively issuing 5 instructions per clock cycle in a lot of
instances.
Also the Core™ 2 Duos are designed in a "monolithic" fashion where both
cores reside on the same die. Because of this design the two cores can
access up to a 4MB pool of L2 Cache without having to go out across the
very slow front-side bus. This L2 Cache can also be allocated on the fly
depending on the task at hand, and if one core is busy it can utilize and
access the entire 4MB pool of cache. The cache prefetching routines are
also greatly improved, so cache misses are a rarity since the L2 caches
are constantly providing the needed data without having to go out to main
memory. Intel notes that these prefetching routines are so efficient that
main memory latency and bandwidth issues are a thing of the past, and the
front-side bus hardly ever gets saturated to impact performance.
Core™ Microarchitecture - Main Features:
• Intel Wide Dynamic Execution
delivers
more instructions per clock cycle as compared to the Netburst®
micro-architecture with a 33% wider execution pipeline allowing each core
to execute and complete up to 4 full instructions simultaneously in a single tick of a chip's clock. In
addition, two features named micro-op fusion and macro-fusion automatically combines two
high-level chip instructions, in some cases into a single instruction, so
the Core™ 2 Duo's can effectively issue 5 instructions per clock cycle as
compared to the Pentium 4/Pentium D and AMD Athlon 64 families which can
only process 3 instructions per clock tick.
• Intel Advanced
Smart Cache includes a shared and
multi-core optimized L2 cache that improves performance by dynamically
allocating cache to each core depending on workload. Improves how
high-speed cache memory is shared by multiple processor cores. For
example, it lets one core control the whole cache when the other core is
idle, and for other times, it governs how the same data can be shared by
both cores.
• Intel Smart
Memory Access is an improved set of algorithms that can predict
what data should be "prefetched" from main memory into faster cache memory
so it's at hand when the processor needs it. Improves performance by using
advanced data pre-fetch algorithms that help hide system-memory latency
effects. This is also known as memory disambiguation logic and it is great
at correctly predicting the order of events and can execute the second
instruction before the first one has completed.
• Intel Advanced
Digital Media Boost means all "SSE" instructions can execute in
a single clock tick. Prior processor families took two clock cycles to
process this data. SSE stands for Streaming SIMD (single instruction,
multiple data) Extensions and speeds several operations such as video
decoding or digital photo processing. Effectively doubles the execution
speed for many of the 128-bit SSE/2/3 instructions commonly used in
multimedia and graphics applications.
• Intel
Intelligent Power Capability allows the electrical shut down of portions of the
chip that aren't needed at a particular time to support instruction execution.
Optimizes power consumption by intelligently powering on
processor-computing elements only when required.
|
Feature |
Function |
Benefit |
|
Intel® Wide
Dynamic Execution |
Executes 4
instructions per clock cycle
• vs. 3 per clock with Intel Netburst®, Intel
Pentium M
and
AMD micro-architectures
• |
Better performance on
multiple application
types and user environments on single and
multithreaded apps:
- Digital video-editing
- Content
creation
- Entertainment /
gaming•
-
Productivity
- Scientific calculations
|
|
Intel® Advanced
Smart Cache |
Increases efficiency
of L2 cache to processor core data transfers
• Entire L2 cache
can be allocated to one core (vs. dedicated L2
for each
core in Pentium D and AMD dual-cores)
|
|
Intel® Smart
Memory Access |
Efficiently feeds
data into Intel's Wide Dynamic Execution engine
• Maximizes main
memory to processor bandwidth and
reduces
latency |
|
Intel® Advanced
Digital Media Boost |
Allows 128-bit
SSE/2/3 instructions to execute in a single clock cycle
• Same
instructions execute in 2 cycles on Intel Netburst®
, Intel
mobile and AMD micro-architectures |
Better performance on
apps that use SSE
instructions:
• Video, speech,
gaming, multimedia,
photo processing
• Encryption, financial
• Engineering,
scientific
|
|
Intel®
Intelligent Power Capability |
• Conroe 65W
desktop mainstream TDP
•
Woodcrest 80W
server mainstream & 40W ultra dense TDP
•
Continued
low power mobile platform w/ "Merom" in Q4
|
Can help enable
quieter, more power and
efficient system designs
Can help reduce overall
power consumption |
Better Acoustics
Intel Core™ 2 Duo processors are equipped with a new Digital
Thermal Sensor (DTS) that enables efficient processor and platform thermal
control. Thermal sensors located with the processor measure the maximum
temperature on the die at any given time. Intel® Quiet System Technology,
included in the Intel® 965 Express Chipset family, uses the DTS to
regulate the system and processor fan speeds. The acoustic benefit of
temperature monitoring is that system fans spin only as fast as needed to
cool the system, and slower spinning fans generate less noise.
Platform Support
A
platform based on the Intel® 965 Express Chipset family (P965, G965 & Q965) with an optimized
DDR2-800 memory engine for improved system performance, is the ideal compliment for
the Intel Core™ 2 Duo processor. New and enhanced technologies in the area
of Intel integrated graphics found in the G965 chipset (X3000), improved
HD 8-channel sound, 6 onboard SATA 3G ports with options for RAID 5, up to
10 USB 2.0 ports and extensive desktop manageability found in the Q965
chipset adds an array of capabilities to the new platform for the rest
of 2006 and well into 2007. This
new combination of processor and chipset brings an unparalleled level of
performance to the
desktop. These new Intel chipsets will be covered in another ASI technical
document up on our
ASI/Intel
Technical Resource Center, and seen in the September '06
ASI Technical
Newsletter.
Motherboards:
Because the Core™2 Duo and Core™2 Extreme
processors use less power than the prior generations, like the
Pentium 4/Pentium D processors, a motherboard's voltage regulator module (VRM)
has to support the lower voltage of these new Core™ 2 Duo processors in
this voltage range: 0.850V-1.3525V.
Also, besides the Intel 965 chipset family based boards, motherboards
using other Intel (975X, 946), and non-Intel chipsets (nVidia 590/570) for
example are available with the correct voltage regulation down on the
board to support the reduced core voltage of the Core™ 2 Duo processors.
Older revisions of motherboards now being used in the field using the 975X chipset, such as Intel's
D975XBX board, might not have the correct VRM circuitry to support the
Core™ 2 Duos. Other MBs based on older chipsets like the 865G, 915 and 945
for example can still support the Conroe processors if the correct VRM
circuitry is integrated onto the board. Because of this confusion over
which MBs and which of their revisions support the C2Ds, we
created a chart with all the MBs we currently resell that support the Core™
2 Duos to make it easier for our sales reps and customers =>
Core™
2 Duo MB Support Chart.
Chassis:
Intel
thermal specifications require the use of a
Thermally Advantaged Chassis (TAC) version 1.1 when integrating
an Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor
into your system. A "TAC"
is designed to
maintain an internal ambient chassis temperature below 38oC to
help aid in keeping the processor's core temperature below its maximum
Thermal Design Power (TDP), also referred to as Thermal Guideline. This is
the maximum amount of heat which a thermal solution must be able to
dissipate from the processor, so that the processor will operate under
normal operating conditions.
A TAC version 1.1 chassis
is
defined by the presence of an 80mm side-panel air duct, a 92mm rear
chassis fan and side-panel venting holes above the graphics and
add-in card slots to provide additional cooling for high-end PCI
Express graphics and other peripherals. One great benefit of using the Core™
2
Duos with their 65W power envelope is the ability to assemble much quieter
and cooler systems in smaller form factors such as picoBTX and nanoBTX. These
unique compact
systems are showing up in numerous vertical markets and used as the main
Media Center server or extender device throughout the digital home. Contrast
these compact systems with ones built using Pentium 4 processors with their 115W TDP, Pentium D
with 95W and
the Pentium Processor Extreme with 130W, which all translates to larger, noisier, and
less energy efficient systems.
To view Intel's Thermally Advantaged
Chassis list =>
Click Here
Power Supply:
Intel highly recommends an ATX12V version 2.2
power supply for use with both the Core™2 Duo (65W) and
Core™2 Extreme (75W) processors. Please check
www.intel.com/go/powersupplies for the appropriate support and validated
power supplies. But please only use this chart as a guideline, since your particular
system configuration will dictate the total wattage needed to run your
system reliably. For a
basic system using onboard graphics, Intel recommends a power supply in
the 250-450W range and I would err towards the high-end unless you're
using a very
small footprint chassis. For a system with a discrete PCI Express x16
video card, Intel recommends a power supply in the 450-600W range, and if
you employ two high-end 7950GX2s in SLI with multiple hard drives, you
might even consider going with a 700W power supply.
Heatsink
(Boxed Core™ 2
Duo Heatsink Fan Info)
The Intel® Core™2 Duo processors E6700,
E6600, E6400, and E6300 ship with a FCLGA4-L fan-heatsink with an Intel
part number of D60188-001. Some things to know about this fan-heatsink are
the following:
This ATX thermal solution was designed for
and should only be used with desktop Intel® Core™2 Duo processors rated at
a Thermal Design Profile of 65W.
- It is not backward compatible with any
Pentium® 4 or Pentium® D processor fan-heatsinks and should not be used
on Pentium® 4 or Pentium® D processors.
- You should also not use the older Pentium®
4 or Pentium® D boxed processor fan-heatsinks on desktop Intel® Core™ 2
Duo processors.
This fan-heatsink is RoHS
compliant.
This fan-heatsink utilizes a new TC-1996
Thermal Interface Material (TIM). Intel will be offering the TIM
replacement in a syringe for the Intel® Core™2 Duo and Intel® Core™2
Extreme processors. Be sure to clean the fan-heatsink and processor
integrated heat spreader of any debris or previous applied material prior
to reapplication of the TIM.
- You may order TIM replacement kits through
Intel Customer Support. The Intel part number is D54816-001. For contact
information for your region, click here.
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