Intel's 'Core 2 Duo,' Israel and heroic freakin' geeks

Dell, HP destops with Core 2 Duo chip

We cannot lose with this kind of dedication to purpose, this kind of international support, and yes: this kind of Israeli geekdom:

Intel's much heralded "Core 2 Duo" processor was introduced over the last few days. As if writing posts like this on a Dell-E1505 with an ole-fashioned "Core Duo" wasn't fast enough...

Intel had been falling behind rival AMD over the past couple of years, both in processor speed and in power consumption. The only bright spot was the Pentium M, which was designed in Intel's Haifa labs.

Intel is now betting the company on the same wizards who designed the Pentium M, and from early reviews, the new architecture out of Israel appears to blow AMD and all other competitors away.

More amazing is that Intel's Haifa workers have remained on the job continuously even while under constant rocket bombardment. Some worked from home, some worked from bomb shelters with Wi-Fi connections, but all of them continued to work with no loss of productivity.

Intel never explicitly trumpets Israel as the source of its innovations, but a small acknowledgment comes from the name of the laptop version of this chip: Merom, named after a lake in Israel during Biblical times.

From the JPost:

"Output has not been affected by the violence," said Koby Bachar, spokesman for Intel Israel. "The factory is still open although some of our employees are working from home and connecting to our server from there [as a result of the situation]."

Similarly, the city as a whole, which is renowned for its concentration of R&D and engineering activity, continues to work despite the attacks.

Yitshak Apeloig, president of the Haifa Technion, Israel's major science and engineering school, said the city's R&D activity was still functioning with approximately 75% of workers still attending work and many working from home."

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When the 1973 Yom Kippur War erupted, the Israeli army asked a couple of Technion professors to come up with a way to scramble the guidance systems of incoming Russian-made missiles that were pummeling some towns, Technion spokesman Amos Levav said during an interview at the campus two weeks ago. The mission was accomplished in a couple of days.

(Note to those offended by the term "geek, geekdom," etc: please allow me a moment to remove my eyeglasses before you take that well-earned swing...)

(Hat tip: Elder of Ziyon)