On July 27, 2006, semiconductor company Intel Corp. introduced the Core 2 as its premier brand of personal computer processors (or central processing units). One of its earliest entries was the Core 2 Duo Processor E6600, which appeared less than a month after the debut of Core 2 brand. Designed as a processor for desktop PCs, the E6600 is part of the Core 2's E6000 series.
Manufacture
The E6600 falls under a division of Core 2 chips dubbed Core 2 Duo. The "Duo" suffix stands for dual-core processors: chips with two cores, or processing units. Intel places both core on a single thin wafer of semiconductor material. This structure, referred to as a die, measures 143 square millimeters and contains 291 million processing transistors. Intel uses the 65 nanometer manufacturing process for the chip, which proceeded the 45 nanometer process that made the Core 2 CPUs smaller and thinner. Each E6600 processor uses a 64-bit instruction set for its data.
Clock Speed
Each processor has a clock speed -- or clock rate or processor speed -- which is the rate at which it operates. This characteristic is usually measured in gigahertz. For the Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, the clock speed is 2.4GHz. This makes it one of the faster entries of the E6600 series, which has a clock speed range of 1.86 to 3GHz. For Intel Core 2 Duo desktop chips as a whole, the range is 1.8 to 3.3GHz.
Front-Side Bus Speed
Another characteristic of the processor is the front-side bus speed. Usually measured in megahertz, but sometimes in gigahertz, this is the rate at which the CPU transmits data with the computer's motherboard by connecting with the front-side bus interface. The FSB speed of the Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 is 1,066MHz. This places it on the low end in this category within the E6000 series, as the only other FSB speed available is 1,333MHz. It fares better, however, within the Core 2 Duo desktop family, which includes a bottom FSB speed of 800MHz.
L2 Cache
A Level 2 cache is included in processors as a secondary memory bank for high-access speed to the computer's most frequently used data; this way, the chip does not need to go the slower route of relying on the system memory. The Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 has a 4 megabyte L2 cache, which places it in good company with other members of the E6000 series; only two of the ten CPUs have 2MB instead of 4MB. Intel Core 2 Duo desktop CPUs have a 2 MB, 3 MB, 4 MB or 6 MB L2 cache.
Tags: Intel Core, Core desktop, Core E6600, E6000 series, Intel Core E6600