Some quiet, but interesting, changes have been made to Intel's Core 2 lineup.
They've recently added two new versions of the Conroe core, the E6300 and E6400. Clock speeds and cache size remains the same, but thermal profile goes down significantly. While idling, these chips will now only steal a mere 12W, almost half of the earlier revisions 22W. This is likely in direct response to AMD's Brisbane core, which idles only at 7W. Considering that many servers actually spend most of their time with CPUs idling, a lower “Typical TDP” is something that can result in significant cost reductions in the long run. Unless you are buying trays direct from Intel, you won't have much of a choice in which revision you are getting, though ultimately that's all you'll be able to find. This doesn't effect how much power the CPU uses while loaded.
