By launching the Core 2 Duo CPU's, Intel shook the processing world awake. AMD had, compared to the Pentium 4 and Pentium D, superior products with the Athlon64 and Athlon64 X2. With the Core 2 Duo Intel didn't have hot-running sluggish CPU's anymore. Instead they sort of reclaimed the 'best-CPU'-throne.

Before the launch of the Core 2 Duo, at July 27 2006, some samples already hit the market. These samples indicated that the Core 2 Duo was fast and a good overclocker. Consider having an E6400 (2,13GHz) running at 3,2GHz in the third-quarter of 2006! More than enough CPU's of that time are able to do this without problems.

The Core-microarchitecture has new key features that improves performance. Parts of it are based on the Pentium-M (that could do more per MHz than the Pentium 4 and was a lot cooler) but then reorganized. Using shared L2-cache (Advanced Smart Cache) there aren't huge delay's in cache access and techniques like Advanced Digital Media Boost can process 128-bit SSE2 instructions in one cycle rather than two (Pentium 4/D needed two cycles for this). Intel's Core 2 Duo has more new interesting features which I'm not going to mention here . The result of all the new techniques is that the Core 2 Duo can do a lot more per MHz than the old Pentium 4 while being energy-efficient and those two things are very important.