It's not often pioneering changes are made on the CPU market. The times we've seen large performance improvements have been when the CPU manufacturers moved to new and more efficient manufacturing processes, and in between smaller steps in the shape of updated revisions and steppings. Historically a substantial revolution happens about every 3 to 4 years due to the launch of a completely new CPU architecture. With a slow entry on the portable market the Pentium M came about a year and a half ago and by then Intel started realizing that there maybe is a solution to the rampant problem the Pentium 4 CPUs were. Then nothing, until 2006 when Intel showed preliminary performance figures of its upcoming architecture. Enthusiast websites and forums were having a fit - the results presented were just too good to be true. By mid May we were invited for some quality time and to test the new CPUs. The benchamrks were still the same, but the setups were still configured by Intel. Even though we by now were in general convinced, we would be more confident having some of our own setups to run tests with, which is what we will show you today.
Two weeks ago Intel introduces its new series of CPUs for desktop computers, which in the beginning of the development had the acronym NGMA, Next Generation Micro Architecture, and later became known by the more famous name Conroe. To even further mark the start of a new era, the, to say the least, well known name Pentium has been demoted in favor of the new "Core 2 Duo". We will today have a closer look at the architecture behind the name Conroe, the different flavors it comes in, performance comparisons with it's competitors and last, but certainly not least, overclocking.
We start by having a look at how things were a couple of years back.
