Intel Core 2 Extreme

Along with its future mobile chip offerings, Intel is readying its next-generation desktop processors, which could make its way into Apple's Macs later this year. Announced under the Core 2 Duo brand in early May, the new "Conroe" chips will likely bring performance enhancements and power consumption efficiencies to better compete with offerings from its rivial AMD. The company plans on debuting 2.93GHz Extreme version of Core 2 chip--for high-end gamers--alongside its 2.66GHz mainstream CPU model in July. The only difference between the Conroe chips will be the clockspeed, according to ExtremeTech. The publication today posted preliminary benchmarks on the new Core 2 Extreme chips, which show significant performance increases over older Intel Pentium Extreme chips (which have higher clock speeds) and AMD's Athlon-64.

Both versions of the Conroe chip will have 4MB of shared L2 cache, although some of the lower-end models will only have 2MB of shared cache, according to the report. "Conroe is a four-wide architecture, so can issue four instructions per clock, as opposed to the three-wide used in NetBurst and Athlon 64 architectures. The Core 2 will also contain a full 128-bit wide SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions) engine that can execute one SIMD instruction per clock." According to the report, Intel plans to ship a 3.2GHz Extreme CPU later this year, while a quad-core CPU for enthusiast desktops is expected sometime in Q1 of 2007.

by MacNN Staff