Inside Intel's Core architecture
Intel's Core architecture now underlies mobile, desktop and server chips, and is a major departure from the Pentium 4's NetBurst design.
It is hard to overstate the importance of the Core micro-architecture to Intel, and thus to the rest of the industry. The product of a major debate within Intel (what Pat Gelsinger, General Manager of the Digital Enterprise Group, called the 'speed freaks versus brainiacs'), it marks the victory of those who felt that extra performance was best achieved not by constantly upping the processor's clock speed, but by going for ever more parallel systems with much finer control of performance versus power consumption.
With the Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Extreme, the Core architecture is being applied to mobile (Merom) and desktop (Conroe) processors, which now join last month's Xeon 5100 (Woodcrest) to put basically the same chip in everything from notebooks to servers.
