Intel Woodcrest arrives on Monday

Intel's new Woodcrest processor comes at us with the intention to compliment and ultimately replace Dempsey, Intel's latest dual-core Xeon processor based on the NetBurst microarchitecture. While both Dempsey and Woodcrest are based on 65nm processes, Woodcrest will focus a great deal on power consumption, consuming on average only 65watts while Dempsey uses approximately 130 watts under load. Being a NetBurst component, Dempsey scaled high in clockspeed, reaching up to 3.73GHz on a 1066MHz FSB. It also employed a 2x2MB L2 cache structure versus Woodcrest's shared 4MB L2 cache. Another detail to note is that Dempsey is capable of processing up to four threads simultaneously thanks to HyperThreading, versus Woodcrest's maximum of two -- HyperThreading is not enabled on the first Core 2 Duos.