Core 2 Duo Launch: Hey Intel, That's Not Our Cover!

I promised I'd report back on the Intel Core 2 Duo (aka "Conroe") launch event I went to yesterday. As I expected, there wasn't much in the way of truly new news there, but there were lots and lots of fast Core 2 Duo machines there, such as new workstations and XPS enthusiast boxes from Dell. And I was particularly impressed by a demo of some game characters being rendered in real-time--Intel described the animation as Shrek-level quality, which was absolutely true. (That's not the highest praise possible--"Pixar-level" would be a far greater compliment as far as I'm concerned--but it's still remarkable what a cutting-edge desktop PC can do these days.)

Intel's tagline for the Core 2 chips is pretty straightforward--they're calling them "The World's Best Processors." Judging from their outstanding performance in our WorldBench 5 speed tests, this may one of the few instances in computer history of a company making a claim that sounds like outrageous hype...but is, in fact, a simple statement of fact.

For me, though, the most memorable moment of the morning was a completely unexpected one. The event kicked off with a speech by Intel CEO Paul Ottelini in which he talked, among other things, about the era in which the CPU wars were about clockspeed. To make his point, he had a slide in which he showed covers of old computer magazines, going all the way back to the days when a 90-MHz machine was a hot rod.

Here's the slide (which is a bit fuzzy because it's a still from a video I shot with my little Canon Elph):



I wasn't surprised by the old covers, since we'd given Intel some images of old PCWs to help them out. But I was startled, to say the least, by that PC World on the far right, showing the January, 2003 issue with its great big "First 3-GHz PCs for 2003" line.

How come I was flummoxed by a PCW cover? Well, we never did that one. Here's the real January, 2003 issue, which did mention 3-Ghz PCs, but as a text-only line above our logo:



I asked our Intel contact what happened, and he apologized and said that an overzealous graphics specialist had taken liberty with our cover to make the 3-gig line a tad more prominent. These things happen, I guess...and at least it was basically a line we had indeed put on our cover. (If Intel had Photoshopped in references to the P4 trouncing AMD's Athlon...well, that would have been another story.)

This does bring up an interesting point, though--which is that back in the late 1980s and 1990s, PC World and other magazines did tons of cover stories on CPU speed bumps that are entertaining now--but which were huge at the time.

Here's my favorite: a 1989 cover on the "Fastest PCs Ever!", which were 33-MHz 386s. Geez, who'd ever need more speed than that?



After while, though, folks got speed fatigue--and eventually, new PCs provided more speed than many people needed for garden-variety tasks. A 3-GHz PC was certainly a boon if you were a hardcore gamer or a video pro, but didn't really have much of an impact on Web browsing or word processing.

All of that translated into declining newsstand sales for issues of PC World that focused on speed increases. That was readers' way of telling us "We're not quite as interested in CPU performance as we used to be." Which is why we mentioned the 3-GHz chip on the cover but didn't trumpet it as a breakthrough.

Our competitors had a similar attitude--I'm not sure if there was a magazine in America that thought a 3-GHz processor was a blockbuster topic. And maybe that's why Intel decided to conjure up a major cover story on the subject.

Getting back to the Core 2 Duo launch, we're now in an era in which nobody thinks that the CPU wars are about clockspeeds. But neither are new, faster processors irrelevant. For one thing, Core 2 Duo is a great leap forward rather than the teensy incremental steps that many new chips have offered. Dual-core chips make multitasking smoother, and therefore provide benefits even if you're not using applications that push a chip to its limits.

And finally, the things that people are starting to do with computers are catching up with the horsepower that new chips provide. You can bet, for instance, that a heck of a lot more people are doing PC-based video editing today than they were when the first 3-GHz systems came out.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying that the Core 2 Duo is a considerably bigger story than those first 3-GHz CPUs. And while it still wasn't quite a primary cover story for PC World in print, it is mentioned pretty prominently on our September issue's cover, soon to reach subscribers. And our online coverage of Core 2 Duo and the first Core 2 Duo PCs has been extremely popular.

What's your level of interest in the Core 2 Duo and other new CPUs? Tepid, intense, or somewhere in the middle?