New Core 2 Duo Wolfdale revision (E0) looking good.

[smilingcrow]

XBitlabs reviewed the E8600 last month and it bodes well for the new E0 stepping. They managed 3.9GHz at the stock voltage of 1.2V and the power consumption when over-clocked was also reduced compared to the previous revision. The E8600 (3.33GHz) is seemingly currently the only CPU using this revision but the cheaper E8500 & E8400 will also use it in the future.

Being able to hit 3.9GHz at stock voltage means you can still use Speedstep which will still allow a fairly low idle power draw by Core 2 Duo standards whilst still giving very high dual-core performance.
As a comparison the low end 65nm C2D CPUs (2MB cache) would often top out at ~2.8GHz at stock voltage so these chips manage a much higher clock speed without a voltage increase and you get the benefit of 6MB cache and SSE 4.1.
They seem a good compromise for people looking for top end performance without ignoring green issues, provided you can face the high price.

[Schlotkins]

Thanks for pointing out this review - very nice to see the E0 stepping has some power benefits!