The chaps over at Digit-life reviewed the Core2 Duo processors in the form of the E6400 and the E6700. The latter is a production line Core2 Duo, not an engineering sample. The processors are compared to the FX62, the FX60 and the XE 965 - the results never left any doubts! Conroe rocks!

On the whole, we can say that the new processors from Intel turned out even more impressive than we expected. Considering that our expectations were quite high. Looking at the results, we don't want to sing the praises, congratulate Intel with the victory, laud the new core, etc. We'd rather look through the diagrams once again to understand what the world giant of CPU building has unleashed. What we'll have to live with :). Conroe and its successors are here for a long time, that's obvious. The efficiency per GHz it demonstrated is not just admirable - there is the reverse of the medal: such impressive results are not obtained easily. So we cannot expect anything cardinally new for at least three or four years. We'll see Conroes with increased clocks and probably with larger caches. There will most certainly appear more cores. But the architecture will hardly change.

What can we say about the architecture looking at the test results? Conroe offers relatively low results in 3D modeling and CAD/CAE packages. Of course, its results are still excellent for its clocks. But they are less impressive than the others. So we partially confirmed the hypothesis that the classical FPU in the new core... no, it's not "bad", but it's less perfect than the other units. CPU RightMark and Adobe Photoshop CS2 also prove that. The manufacturer will probably make up for this problem with higher clocks. Especially as the clock margin is assumably large. The situation in 3D modeling and bitmap graphics can be improved by increasing the number of cores - these algorithms can be easily distributed between multiple cores.

Excellent results are demonstrated by the new core in data archiving, web-server test, OCR, and games. Having analyzed this collection of tests, we can establish a fact that Intel did well for memory and cache operations and well as for "chaotic code" that used to stupefy the long-piped Pentium 4. In fact, the company defeated AMD on its own field with its favourite weapon.