32 bit Core Duo Notebooks will fully depreciate in 6 months

AnandTech did some performance benchmarks on INTEL's spanking new Core Duo 32 bit x86 mobile processor. The results are unimpressive, for instance, compared to Pentium M 1.86 GHZ, the Core Duo 1.86GHZ with two cores showed only 11% performance increase in Business Winstone 2004 and about 22% in Office Productivity SYSMark 2004. It seems that the antiquated shared FSB architecture in all INTEL designs really hurts performance when you adding cores. Also battery life is no beter for the 65nm Core Duo, indicating that going 65nm provided INTEL almost nil performance/watt benefit. The Core Duo is only 2.16GHZ max, while the AMD Turion 64 ML-44 is a 2.4GHZ 64 bit processor.

Since Windows Vista requires 64 bit for full enjoyment, buying an obsolete 32 bit Core Duo for marginal performance improvement will be a fast route to depreciation -- if IRS approves.