NetBurst was trying to achieve high clock speeds, but this drew high amounts of power, making hard for the processors to work at the high speeds, so they canceled the plans to launch the 4Ghz processor.

Three chips will be available, and all are dual-core. Also, they will be available from the second half of 2006. They are: Conroe for desktop, Merom for notebooks and Woodcrest for servers.

It seems that Woodcrest will boost performance by 80% and 35% less power consumption, compared to a dual-core 2.8Ghz Xeon. Also, Conroe will boost performance with 40% and reduce power consumption with 40% compared to a dual-core Pentium D 950. And Meron will be a little faster than the Core Duo T2600, and will maintain the battery life at the same time.

Here are the features that Core Microarhitecture has:

1. Intel Wide Dynamic Execution, which lets as many as four instructions be executed in a single tick of a chip’s clock. In addition, a feature called macrofusion automatically combines two high-level chip instructions, in some cases into a single instruction.

2. The Digital Media Boost means all “SSE�? instructions can execute in a single clock tick. SSE stands for streaming SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) extensions and speeds several operations such as video decoding or digital photo processing.

3. Intel Advanced Smart Cache improves how high-speed cache memory is shared by multiple processor cores. For example, it lets one core control the whole cache when the other core is idle, and for other times, it governs how the same data can be shared by both cores, Rattner said.

4. Intel Smart Memory Access is an improved set of algorithms that can predict what data should be “prefetched�? from main memory into faster cache memory so it’s at hand when the processor needs it, he said.

5. Intel Intelligent Power Capability lets us shut down portions of the chip that aren’t needed at a particular time to support instruction execution.