We've all been watching the Core 2 Duo lately, and so far it looks to be a very promising CPU. Already available as a pre-order from some retailers, Intel is still on-track for their release of the processor this Thursday. Intel is already known for having the manufacturing capability to supply pretty much whatever the world demands, so likely the CPU can be in the hands of retailers and customers in less than a week.
"It's already shipping to customers, and details of its architecture have been revealed publicly, but that won't stop Intel from making a big splash out of the formal announcement of its new Core 2 Duo dual-core processor. Intel will launch the chip at a press conference at its Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters this Thursday."
Core 2 Duo will probably impress a lot of people, if only because Intel's initial dual core offerings were so mediocre. From everything we've seen, though, the performance and power output of the new cores will be amazing. The highest-clocked Core 2 CPU will be running at 2.67GHz, more than 1000Mhz slower than the current fastest Intel CPUs. With the improvements in the architecture, hopefully that will be largely offset.