After losing the battle lines consecutively for three years, the second half of 2006 saw a complete reversal of fortunes for Intel and their Core microarchitecture range of processors. From holding the rear-end of processor performance in the mid and high-end lineup, the incoming of the Core 2 Duo processor and its variants lunged Intel forward with industry leading performance, power and thermals. So Core 2 Duo wins hands down in the Dual Core processor segment, but AMD at that point of time was already throwing teasers of their Quad FX platform (also known as 4x4 platform). As we all know by now, AMD's plans to dethrone Intel was sideswiped when the blue team dished out the first ever consumer-class quad-core processor (Core 2 Extreme QX6700) in November 2006.



Link: HardwareZone