Photos: Intel Core 2 Duo launch

Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini stood on stage at the company's headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif., to formally launch the company's most important product in a decade, the Core 2 Duo processor.

Otellini holds up the Core 2 Duo processor, which was built with Intel's 65-nanometer manufacturing technology. It has 291 million transistors packed into an area smaller than the fingernail on Otellini's little finger, he said.

Velocity Micro's PCs are among the first to be available with the new Core Extreme and Core 2 Duo processors through Best Buy's retail stores.

Intel demonstrated the new processors running on this fiery blue desktop PC from boutique gaming PC vendor Falcon Northwest.

Dozens of systems were available for demonstrations following Otellini's speech, including this number from Voodoo PC. Some PCs based on the Core Extreme processor are available immediately, while less expensive ones will start to trickle out over the next several weeks.

Dell's new subsidiary, Alienware, showed off a new chassis design for a Core Extreme PC that has a hinged cover for its media card reader and DVD drive.

Intel and its partners were also showing off preproduction notebooks based on Merom, the notebook version of the Core 2 Duo. New notebooks will start to appear toward the end of August, said Dadi Perlmutter, the new solo head of Intel's Mobility Group, in an interview.