Originally Posted by backtomac
Maybe you can enlighten us and tell us what is faster and suitable for it's intended market.
It was in the next paragraph: They're all roughly equivalent. Woodcrest is basically the same chip as Conroe but for multi-CPU machines (and using a new chipset and memory standard that helps RAM capacity but hurts RAM performance). Conroe can only have one CPU socket (though even that will get you up to four cores later this year, as has been pointed out). Merom is equivalent to Conroe, though clocked a bit lower and with much better power management.
Under the hood they're all basically the same chip. Clock for clock they're all equivalent in speed. In fact, in a home-built desktop system, you'd probably *want*" Merom, because it's extremely quiet at stock speed, and extremely overclockable if you choose to push it (more so than Conroe with stock voltage/cooling).
The Core 2 Duo / Xeon 5100 family are all fantastic chips, which is why you see Intel putting them in every line as quickly as they can.