Today marks the official release of Intel's newest processor: the Core 2 Duo. The new chip marks the first time Intel has released a brand new type of processor in 12 years and, of course, marks the end of the beloved Pentium that in many ways changed the face of personal computing forever. Intel, with its usual sense of hubris, calls the Duo "the greatest processor in the world" and then went about slashing prices on its older processors to match price cuts by AMD earlier this week.

Will the Duo have the same effect on the development of computers that the Pentium did? Will we look back 12 years from now to find that computing power has increased 300 times the way processor speed did? My feeling is yes - part makers haven't run out of new and innovative ways to shrink things or make them much more powerful and I think this trend will continue for as long as there's money to spend on computers.

Via Extreme Tech