Intel’s New Cheaper CPU - Core 2 Duo E4300 – New Allendale Core Micro-Architecture

The CES has proved to be more exciting than usual and as expected, Steve Jobs stole the show with his iPhone keynote speech. Intel on the other hand has started to release it Quad Core Processors.
Along with the new powerful quad core processors, Intel is also trying to get the Core 2 CPU's in to the low end CPU market (where untill now Intel has been very successful with the Celron CPUs). Hence the E400 series and the new micro architecture - Allendale.
The Allendale micro architecture is based on the Conroe micro architecture found in all the Core 2 Duo processors. It differs in

that the Conroe processors have been designed with 4MB of cache. Intel has disconnected 2 MB of cache on the cheaper processors the E6300 and E6400, but the physical cache is still there. On the E4000 series and the Allendale micro-architecture there is only 2 MB of cache to begin with. This saved Intel a couple of million transistors, thus reducing the cost of production which means that we get cheaper processors.
The E4300 is priced at $163 and Intel plans to make the CPU even more affordable in Q2 by reducing the price to $113.
So what are we getting for our money? The Core2Duo E4300 has an 800 MHz FSB, which is great news for overclocking since its frequency is 200 MHz (compared to the 266 MHz frequency in the E6000 series which made overclocking a bit harder). On the other hand it does not support Intel's Virtualization Technology. It comes with a clock speed of 1.8 GHz but as mentioned can very easily be overclocked.

read more at www.cp65.com