Ten Year Anniversary of Core 2 Duo and Conroe: Moore’s Law is Dead, Long Live Moore’s Law
by Ian Cutress on July 27, 2016 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core 2 Duo
- Conroe
- ITRS
- Nostalgia
- Time To Upgrade
Looking To The Future
While today is Conroe’s 10 year anniversary, I was a post-teenage system builder when it was first released. Now, as AnandTech’s CPU editor, it has been fun for me to delve back into the past and revisit some of the fundamental design changes that would steer a significant amount of Intel’s future design. You can certainly feel many of the technologies used in the Core microarchitecture in Skylake today, including operation fusion and large shared caching. Now of course, a number of technologies have been developed since which make a big difference too, such as micro-op caches from Sandy Bridge, an L3 cache, even adaptations for eDRAM and moving the memory controller and north bridge on-die. But it does make me wonder if there will be another Intel microarchitecture as important as this down the line. On the AMD side of the fence, everyone is looking at Zen with wide eyes and anticipation. While we have been told not to expect it to take the performance crown, a number of users and industry analysts hope that it brings more competition to the x86 space, enough to rekindle the competitive spirit in silicon back in the mid-2000s.
Looking into the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors report, and even just the 50-page summary, there are a large number of predictions in the industry that could happen. There are thousands of people working to make sure the next process node, and the one after that, happens with good yields and on time. The report goes into detail about how shrinking that process won’t happen forever, which is a sentiment that the industry has had for a while, and it lays out in a series of working groups what needs to happen at each stage of the process to go beyond Moore’s Law, specifically regarding silicon stacking, TSVs, and the movement to 3D chips. The ITRS report is set to be the last, with the new focus on devices, systems, SiP and other technologies beyond Moore’s Law. Some have heralded the lack of a future ITRS report as a stark warning, however the fact that we can’t keep shrinking forever has been a known fact, especially at the point where most businesses won’t shrink a process node unless it can net them an overall profit. The movement to 3D makes everything a lot more complicated, but it has to happen in order to provide semiconductor growth and improvements beyond 2D.
Sources
Johan’s Conroe vs K8 Architecture Deep Dive, 2006
Anand’s Core 2 Extreme and Core 2 Duo Review, 2006
International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors 2.0 Report, 2015/2016
Addendum: This article originally stated that the Core 2 Duo/Conroe was derived in part from the Pentium Pro. This was due to typo in the original 2006 article and has since been adjusted.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
158 Comments
View All Comments
e1jones - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
My E8400 is still my daily driver, 4x 2gb and an SSD swapped in later as the boot drive. Still runs great, except it tends to get bogged down by the TrustedInstaller and the Firefox memory leaks.rarson - Friday, August 5, 2016 - link
I've got an E8600 in an Abit IP35 Pro motherboard. I was having a hard time finding DDR2-1066 last I looked, so I settled for 800. With an SSD and 7870, it's surprising how well it still games. I don't think I'll upgrade the GPU again just due to the fact that I'm limited to PCI-e 2.FourEyedGeek - Monday, August 8, 2016 - link
You could get a higher end GPU and still benefit from increased performance, then get a new CPU motherboard combo when you want too.BrokenCrayons - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
I just upgraded out of a Q6600 and 4GB DDR2 about 2 months ago and I admit that I was still kicking around the idea of leaving it alone as I was pulling the motherboard out of the case. I replaced it with a cheap AMD 860k and 16GB DDR3 which really hasn't done a lot to improve the system's performance. In retrospect, I think I could realistically have squeezed another couple of years out of it, but the motherboard's NIC was iffy and I really wanted reliable ethernet.As for laptops, I've got a couple C2Ds kicking around that are perfectly adequate (T2310 & P8400) for daily use. I really can't see any point in replacing them just yet. Core was a good design through all its iterations.
Beany2013 - Wednesday, July 27, 2016 - link
I like your style - rather than drop $100 on a midlevel intel NIC, you replace an entire platform.I strongly approve of these economics :-)
Michael Bay - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
USB3 is kind of nice.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, July 28, 2016 - link
Well the NIC wasn't the only reason, but it was the last in a series of others that I was already coping with that tipped the scales. The upgrade was under $200 for the board, processor and memory so it really boiled down to one weekend dinner out to a mid-range restaurant. It was worth it for more reliable Steam streaming and fewer VNC disconnects as that wired ethernet port is the only means by which I regularly interact with my desktop since it has no monitor and is crammed into a corner in my utility room.artk2219 - Friday, July 29, 2016 - link
Why didn't you go for an FX if you dont mind me asking? You liked the FM2+ platform a bit better?BrokenCrayons - Friday, July 29, 2016 - link
Actually, I didn't give much of anything in the system a very close look before buying. I admittedly did about twenty minutes of research to make sure the 860k and the bottom feeder motherboard I'd picked would play nicely together before making a purchase. So the CPU & motherboard pair were the result of laziness and apathy rather than a preference for FM2+.artk2219 - Monday, August 1, 2016 - link
Ah ok gotcha, I just wanted to share that if you had a microcenter near you they sell FX 8320E's bundled with motherboards for 125 to 170 depending on which board you want to use. That can be quite the steal and a great base for a new cheap system once you bump the clocks on the 8320E.