It’s funny, I’m staying at a place across the street from AMD’s headquarters (Maryam’s brother is putting us up this week — he works on the Mac team at Apple) and I can bet that AMD’s engineers are working double shifts right now cause Engadget is praising Intel’s Core 2 Duo.

I’d love to be a fly on the wall in the engineer’s offices.

But, that competition is great for us. New machines ahead! Based on what I hear in the office here (there’s some former semiconductor types who work at Podtech — our VCs fund a lot of semiconductor work too) they think Intel has a winner here. Looks like they found a way to beat back heat generation and use less electricity.

Why is that important? Well, look at what Google/Yahoo/Microsoft are building in Washington State: huge datacenters.

If you can reduce power consumption and heat generation by even a little bit that’ll make a big difference over the lifetime of that PC.

Update: TechMeme has more on Intel vs. AMD.