- Intel launched the Core 2 Duo (Conroe) on July 27, 2006, marking 20 years since its release.
- The Core 2 Duo outperformed AMD's Athlon 64 family in all areas, including gaming, restoring Intel's performance lead.
- It ended the GHz race by emphasizing architectural efficiency over clock speed, delivering 40% better performance and 40% lower power consumption.
- Key innovations included a 65nm process, 291 million transistors, improved branch prediction, shared Smart Cache, and higher IPC.
- Even entry-level Core 2 Duo chips surpassed flagship Pentium Extreme Editions while running at half the clock speed.
- The Conroe architecture laid the foundation for Intel's CPU market dominance for over a decade, until AMD's Ryzen matured.