In this interview with THG, Intel talks about raw speed and a 40% gain over the current 3.73 GHz Extreme Edition 965 - which would be rather impressive and could indicate a problem for AMD. Intel also said that Core 2 Extreme-based enthusiast PC will leave the pixel power of a Playstation 3 in the dust. Gamers, this appears to become the most exciting year for you in a long time!

TG Daily: Up to this point, for the last 15 years, the argument in favor of PC gaming has been, "Hey, we have the performance lead. We can put gamers into the experience." Surely, Intel is reliant upon second parties like Nvidia and ATI to help you out getting [polygons drawn], but even that's still part of the Intel architecture. How does that improve and evolve with Core 2 Extreme?

DT: Specifically, we have taken a very different approach with Core than we have taken with any other architecture before on the desktop. We're leveraging what we've learned with the mobile architecture, that we learned back with Centrino, and we improved that in the desktop and the server architecture with 64 bits, virtualization technology, floating-point engines - we bill them together as "Core Engine." So for us, Core 2 is the biggest move forward in terms of an architecture advance that we've had in the last five years...in terms of net gain, both in terms of its performance - which is averaging 40% more in desktop - and also, at the same time, lower power. Usually, that's not what happens for us. Generally, when our performance goes up, so goes the power. We went a different way with a very power-optimized architecture.

The second thing we did is, we didn't require new instructions. We chose to optimize the current instruction set and give it more resources, so the SSE engine is a true 128-bit SSE engine, the cache now has advanced dynamics, it's a four-wide, out-of-order [instruction queue] machine. So several things we've done in the architecture where you can basically take an existing game and it just runs faster. Which is great, because it can plug and play with existing stuff.