New Intel chip breakdown

For those super techy techs out there I found an interesting article about some of the new Intel Core2 Duo and Intel Core2 Duo Extreme chips due out Q3 of this year, with the first set of benchmarks I’ve seen. For those who don’t know, the new chips Intel has been making for the past 6 months or so aren’t super fast 4ghz chips, they’re slower, but there’s two cores to them, so their faster, sort of. I’m no expert on the actual physics, calculus, and engineering on this stuff, so I’ll break it down like this… Imagine a one lane highway that runs at 85 miles per hours (this is the 4 GHz chip). Then, imagine a four lane highway that runs at 65 miles per hour (this is the dual core chip at 2.2 GHz). Which one will be able to clear one millions cars first? The two lane highway, because it has more room to move the cars, even though they move at a slightly slower speed. Basically, the idea behind multi-core chips is adding more lanes to the highway of data. By no means is this a complete scientific metaphor for multi-core chip sets, but I think you get what I’m saying, even if it’s not entirely accurate.

At any rate, the article has some of the first performance specs on the new chips from Intel. I’m pretty excited about this stuff myself. I’m in the market for a laptop before the years end, and as much as I’d like to jump on the Dual Core bandwagon right now, I knew that if I waited it’d be more worth my while. I’d like to see what sort of plans Dell and Apple have for these new chips, especially in light of Vista coming out early next year. Someone should be able to get their hands on one of these systems relatively soon (believe it or not back to school season is 4 weeks away), granted Dell starts putting them in their PCs sooner rather than later, and put on the public beta of Vista to see what sort of performance they get. Obviously, Apple will take a slower amount of time to integrate these chips to their stuff, but I’d be surprised if they’re not going to rush to do it before back to school at well.

-Steve