Intel announced its new Core 2 Duo chips on Monday for both notebooks and laptops, but it's worth mentioning here because they may be the chips that restore Intel to gaming dominance. Without running them through un-Intel-supervised benchmarking, it's too early to tell, but back in March, enthusiast site AnandTech was lucky enough to run some Intel-prepared tests on early versions of the chips, and the results looked promising. Considering that AMD's forthcoming AM2 socket doesn't include a significant CPU redesign, we can't expect any new AMD Athlons to significantly outperform their current market leader, the Athlon 64 FX-60. This leaves AMD vulnerable, and with Core 2 Duo, Intel just might be able to capitalize on the opportunity. As multithreaded games become more prevalent (Intel is showing us some titles tonight, on which we'll report back later), the dual-core CPU battle is going to get a lot more interesting.

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