Intel gets the number with Core 2 Duo

Stan Beer
Monday, 08 May 2006 08:17

Your IT - Home IT

Chip maker Intel, which once made an art form over branding its chips sequentially, appears to be returning to its roots with the word that the second iteration of its new dual processing core line will be dubbed Core 2 Duo. The Core 2 Duo range will include the Conroe desktop chips and Merom notebook processors, and is set to take over from the Pentium range.

Once upon a time, life was simple for PC consumers running DOS and Windows. There were only Intel chips and no real choice until AMD became a serious competitor. With Intel chips, consumers knew what they were getting, there was 8086, 80286, 80386 and 80486, each more powerful and faster than its predecessor. In between releases, Intel cranked up the clock speed of chips to get increased performance, so that you had for
instance a 486 running at 33 Mhz, simply abbreviated to 486/33, followed by 486/50, 486/66 and 486/100.

When Pentium was released, although the x86 branding was dropped, the intuitive feel for the power of the processor was retained - Pentium 60, followed by Pentium 90, Pentium 2, Pentium 3, each running at faster clock speeds. Currently, Intel is up to Pentium 4. However, somewhere in between, consumers started hearing about chips called Celeron and platforms called Centrino and Viiv, and more lately vPro, without really understanding where these chips and platforms fitted into the scheme of things.

Last year Intel's dual core processors burst on the scene, with two chip lines called the Conroe for desktop and the lower power consuming Merom for notebooks. Now, Intel is set to release the second iteration of its dual core range. Intel is still by far the dominant player in the chip making scene but it has performed poorly in the past couple of years, while rival AMD has eaten into its market share to the point where AMD now has a very respectable share of more than 20%, while Intel is now somewhat less than 80%. In the past year, AMD has made significant gains on its bigger rival.

Perhaps for this reason, Intel has decided to go back to a simple and intuitive numbering system, which will indicate the relative performance of the chip. So when Intel gets around to releasing the Core 3 Duo, consumers will know that Moore's Law, Intel and Microsoft are telling them it's time to spend some money for yet another upgrade.