Review: Intel Core 2 Duo/Extreme processors

Essentially there are five strands of Core Microarchitecture development in the Core 2 Duo range.

The first of is Wide Dynamic Execution. This encompasses the ability of each core to process four instructions at a time and the support for macrofusion, which involves combining commonly coupled processor instructions to save execution time. Previously, processor cores could only handle three instructions simultaneously.

Intelligent Power Capability is the management of power the processor draws when running. A sophisticated control in the cores only powers up individual logic systems when they’re needed. As a result power consumption is reduced.

Advanced Smart Cache is the mechanism by which L2 cache is shared between the two cores. The cache is shared and uncontrolled, meaning one core can be dynamically allocated up to 100% of it.

An advantage over independent cache for each core is that data need only be stored in one place if both cores are working on it.

The ability to unify a 4MB cache is great during tasks such as the transcoding of movies; each frame can be completely loaded into cache rather than Ram.

Smart Memory Access ensures that the location of data that the cores are working on is optimally placed in memory, thus reducing the effect of memory latency.

Further to this, improved efficiency of out-of-order instruction processing is achieved by an improvement in the algorithm which deals with the speculative loading of data into the processor’s memory banks.

It sounds complicated (indeed, it is), but it basically means the processor makes use of each clock cycle rather than letting some wastefully slip by.

Intel has also worked on the advanced pre-fetching of instructions in an attempt to decrease the amount of Ram accesses made during an operation. As a result, it's able to better use the cache.

Finally, Advanced Digital Media Boost sees a great improvement in the handling of 128-bit SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions) instructions. These are now completed in a one clock cycle rather than split into two 64-bit calculations as was the case with prior architectures.

The end result is an increase in speed during intensive applications such as video editing.

If that's left you feeling more than a little confused, it's worth taking a look at Intel's promotional video on Core Microarchitecture .