The IT world is abuzz about "Conroe" "Merom" and "Woodcrest", better known as Intel's Core 2 Duo architecture. All three market segments (desktop, mobile, and server) are transitioning to this new unified architecture. You'd have to have been sleeping under a rock to miss all the preview benches and tests of Conroe engineering samples being flogged around the web. The performance numbers are quite astounding, and definitely bring the fight hardcore back to AMD. It'll be another few days before everyone's NDA's lift and we see real and full evaluations of Conroe on the desktop, but it's clear there's much to be excited about. Since we cannot yet do any actual hands on testing we at FastSilicon.com do think you need to know what's at stake, and how well we see Intel pulling off the transition.

Core 2 is a an evolutionary architecture, with its lineage going all the way back to the Pentium Pro. Its modern forerunners, Banias, Dothan, and Yonah have been the core of Intel's Mobile architecture for years now. Focusing on power management, and higher relative IPC (Instructions Per Clock) made this an ideal architecture for the mobile segment. As power and thermal management have become important aspects of the desktop and server environments for obvious reasons, it's an architecture that also lends itself well to the rest of Intel's product range. It's quite fortunate for Intel that they had this sort of parallel development in place. With Prescott P4's, Intel finally realized they'd hit a brick wall in their continued advances in clockspeed with the Netburst architecture. Too many tradeoffs in IPC (Instructions Per Clock) and TDP (Thermal Design Point, which relates to power consumption and heat dissipation) had to be made for the Netburst architecture to scale past 4ghz. Intel's Mobile architecture CPU's ended up becoming the design reference point for Intel's decision to change directions entirely in desktop and server space. It's clear however this has taken a good bit of time for them to orchestrate. Most large companies become their own worst enemies, especially when it comes to changing direction.

During the last year or more while Intel's performed this huge about-face (extending the life of the P4 with dualcore offerings and ramping up Core 2 for desktops, servers, and the mobile market), AMD has had the clear performance crown and has maximized its inherent strengths over Intel's Netburst CPU's quite well and taken not too insignificant amounts of market share, especially in the server arena with its Opteron. Now however, it's a new ballgame, at least on paper.

Surprisingly, I'm not going to rehash the dozen plus articles on Core 2 architecture that you (and I) have already read. I bow my head respectfully to those that have written before me about Core and Core 2 in great detail, focusing on the fundamental design changes and actual raw performance of these new CPU's. Safe to say, Intel's closed the gap in some areas, eliminated it in others, and given AMD's highest end parts a thorough spanking in many aspects. This time around, it's definitely going to be a real fight. Rather than focusing on the numbers, I'm going to focus on the process of how the platform itself is being launched.