The Core 2 Duo platform has also been tested on HD-DVD

Intel’s new processor also looks to excel in multimedia applications.

The world’s largest processor manufacturer gave a small demonstration to the general public in Taipei at the Computex exhibition on how a Conroe-core processor copes with playing HD movies.

The test environment was as follows: an Intel Core 2 Duo processor — which ran at 2,66 GHz — was built into an Intel P965 motherboard, and a video card with an NVIDIA GeForce 6600 GPU was responsible for the graphics display. The optical unit was provided by the TSST (Toshiba Samsung Storage Technologies) HD-DVD reader, the software support was provided by Intervideo with the help of the fancifully named "WinDVD HD DVD Player" program. One of Universal's hit films, Apollo 13, was playing in the player, encoded in VC-1 (Windows Media Video 9) format with a bandwidth of 22 Mbps. The public could watch all of this on an LG HD-Ready LCD display with the 1080i image transmission standard.

During video playback, the CPU load fluctuated between 40% and 60%, which is a good result considering that on a currently available Pentium 4 platform, the same load would be around 80-90%.