The Intel® Core™ Duo processor is a new member of the Intel® mobile processor product line. It is the first Intel® mobile microarchitecture that uses CMP (Core Multi-Processor; i.e., multi cores on die) technology. Targeted to the market of general-purpose mobile systems, the Intel® Core™ Duo processor was built to achieve high performance, while consuming low power and fitting into different thermal envelopes.

In order to achieve the required performance, a CMP-based microarchitecture was designed to achieve power-efficient architecture, each performance improvement was evaluated against the power cost, and only the power-efficient performance features were implemented.

On top of that, special hardware mechanisms were added to better control the static and the dynamic power consumption. As a result, the Intel® Core™ Duo processor provides higher performance in the same form factors without needing to increase the cooling capability.