Intel in Haifa produces the "world's best processor"

The people who follow these things are buzzing about the new Intel Core 2 Duo processor that was introduced today.

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.