The Core Duo was a bit of a disappointment to some and a bit of a surprise to others; while it was only 32-bit, it performed exceptionally well while drawing little electricity, but it never saw widespread use as a desktop processor. In August, Intel followed up with the Core 2 Duo, which addresses the 64-bit concern while increasing performance and the overall capabilities of the architecture. The major improvement, though, is the Core 2 Duo's availability in an FC-LGA 775 desktop processor package, which means that you can finally build or buy a reasonably-priced system based on a modern Intel CPU architecture. But is it a significant improvement? And how does it stack up to the AMD Athlon 64 X2? Read on for an analysis of the Core 2 Duo's performance, power consumption, motherboard and RAM compatibility, and a brief overview of the advantage to 64-bit processing.
The Intel Core 2 Duo processor
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