You know.. it’s actually quite amazing how long the Intel P6 architecture has been with us. When the original P6 architecture was first introduced by Intel, I was still in undergrad back in the east coast, the net was still somewhat new and there was no dot com boom. Here we are, 11 years later, and the P6 architecture is still alive and kicking in the Pentium 4 and Pentium D processors. Of course changes were made over the years. The Pentium Pro processor turned into the Pentium II which turned into the PIII and the P4.. and so on and so on.. but alas, it was still the P6 architecture at heart. Now finally, Intel is set to release the Conroe processor – otherwise known as the Core 2 Duo. With the Core 2 Duo. Intel has a chip which might finally break the performance crown that AMD has owned for several years now. The chip has a shorter pipeline that the current Pentium D; can issue four instructions per clock tick; can contain a full 128 bit wide SSE engine which can execute a single SIMD instruction in a clock tick, and includes 4MB of L2 cache in some versions.

Intel plans on releasing the server version of the Core 2 Duo in June, a desktop version of the processor in July and a laptop version in August. With the release of the new processor architecture, Intel is also going to release a new chipset called the Broadwater chipset or the 965 chipset. The 965 will come in the form of two versions – the P965 and the G965. The G series comes with integrated graphics and will launch a bit later. The biggest change with the 965 chipset is the elimination of the Parallel ATA and IDE interface. SATA is the future at least according to Intel.

Check out ExtremeTech’s article for more information on the upcoming processor announcements from Intel.

[Check it out]

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