The showdown between Intel's new Core Duo and the Pentium D is not going to be very spectacular. Right now, the Core Duo would likely be capable of delivering Pentium D performance if it were accelerated in voltage and clock speed. However, Intel wants to wait until it can deploy its NGMA in late summer. Core Duo E6000 (Conroe) will be within a 65 W thermal design power, thus cutting the Pentium D's 130 W or 95 W in half. It will feature 13 or 14 pipeline stages, a unified and scaleable L2 cache, and launch at clock speeds of up to 2.66 GHz in the desktop space (FSB1066). There will most likely be no Hyper Threading support. At this speed, sources stated performance benefits of about 20% when compared to an Athlon 64 X2 processor at the same clock speed. We can't wait to see this happen, for the sake of heating up the competition a bit more, something that is always great for the consumer!

Pentium D versus Core Duo: The latter (right) does not come with a heat spreader, both because it is meant to be professionally installed, and because it does not have high heat dissipation.

775 contacts (Pentium D, left) versus 479 pins.

The land grid array of the Pentium D vs. Core Duo's pins.

Core Duo Processor Models

Note that this list includes the first Core Duo desktop processors, which are going to be launched in the middle of this year.