Intel Core 2 · 2006 · Santa Clara

On July 27, 2006, Intel launched the Core 2 Duo from Santa Clara — and it was a turning point. The Pentium 4 era had been bruising: the later Prescott-generation chips ran so hot and drew so much power that the design became a cautionary tale in the chip world. AMD's Athlon 64 had beaten Intel on nearly every benchmark for two years. The Core 2 Duo (codenamed 'Conroe') changed all of that in a single day. It beat AMD's best chip by 20–40% in benchmarks and used less power doing it. PC makers raced to design new systems around it; it became one of the best-reviewed chips Intel ever made. The Core 2 line — desktop, laptop, and server variants — restored Intel's dominance and laid the architectural groundwork for every Intel chip through 2015. It was Silicon Valley's most dramatic corporate comeback in the chip wars.