INTEL CORE 2
MICROARCHITECTURE
It was not really hard to find a topic in technology that has really caught my attention. Iam going to talk about the CPU market and Intel�s latest technology called Intel Core 2 Duo microarchitecture codenamed Conroe. As you might know there is two big players on the market AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) and Intel. For awhile now these two companies have been going at each other, with different approaches on how to built a x86 central processing unit, later both companies have added the x64 CPU�s.

From about 2000 to 2005 AMD has managed to take the crown from Intel with their AMD64 line of micro processors. Later in 2004 when AMD has released its dual-core cpu lineup for mainstream users there was a little hope for Intel, as AMD has produced chips that brought top performance to the market. Only a few people knew what Intel had up its sleeves. Intel was working hard on regaining the crown on the CPU market. Intel has admitted that Pentium 4 was not the best architecture to put a fight against AMD. They (Intel) has went back to the drawing board and created a brand new architecture using the technology based on Pentium 3 and there laptop cpu�s called Centrino.

For the most part AMD was not expecting Intel to come back so strongly and completely take over the mainstream and enthusiast market away from its biggest competitor. This is how Intel Core 2 Duo architecture was born. Quoting one of the most trusted website�s on hardware reviews www.anandtech.com, they went even further calling their review article �The Empire Strikes Back�. On July the 14th 2006 the world for the first time in a long time has received the most advanced piece of silicone ever made. The fastest performing desktop CPU�s period. Intel has claimed that Conroe provides 40% more performance at 40% less power compared to the Pentium D, as it turns out they were absolutely right.

Intel has come out so strong beating AMD in general benchmarks such as SISsoft Sandra, power consumption and the biggest benchmark of all: 3D Games. All over the hardware review world Intel's Core 2 Extreme X6800 didn't lose a single benchmark in our comparison; not a single one.

To discuss some of the architectural changes and some of the features added I will use a a couple of new instructions added to this microarchitecture. Intel Wide Dynamic Execution has been added in a big way. The new Core Microarchitecture implies �wide� dynamic execution. It became wide because the future Intel processors will be able to process more commands per clock cycle than their predecessors. By adding an additional decoder and execution units into each core Intel enabled each of the cores to pick and process up to 4 x86 instructions simultaneously, while other Intel processors (desktop and mobile) and AMD competitors can only handle three instructions per clock.