If you wanna read the spec...
The Intel® Core Duo processor is the dual-core version of the Intel Pentium® M processor for notebooks. It is part of the new mobile technology offering from Intel code-named Napa. Unlike Intel's first dual-core designs for desktop PCs, Intel Core Duo is a much more integrated design that shares storage and power management resources within the chip. Here is a quick overview of this new CPU:
Intel's first dual-core optimized CPU
667 MHz front-side bus
Built on new 65nm technology
Two mobile optimized execution cores in a single processor
Parallel threads executed on separate cores with dedicated CPU resources
Intel will also implement a host of new features into the new Intel Core Duo chip.
Intel Smart Cache - This is an enhanced version of handling the L2 cache from the previous dual-core desktop processors that allows both cores to access the same L2 cache.
Intel Dynamic Power Coordination - This feature coordinates the power states between the two cores, enabling them to each individually step down activity as required.
Intel Digital Media Boost - Digital Media Boost provides enhancements to Gaming, Video Streaming, Digital Music and Photography, as well as other multimedia applications.
Intel Advanced Thermal Manager - New thermal sensors and management technology allows for enhanced accuracy with dual-core optimized thermal management.
Intel Virtualization Technology - This delivers a hardware-assisted robust virtualization and manageability solution.
L2 Cache
The desktop version dual-core Pentium D processor uses separate 1MB cache memory banks dedicated to each core. In the Intel Core Duo processor, a single 2MB cache memory bank is available to both cores, reducing the chance that data will have to leave the chip to be temporarily stored in a system's main memory bank. This means that one core can store a piece of data in the cache that might be needed later by the other core, and the other core can access that data without having to leave the chip. The larger amount of storage allows Intel Core Duo's cores to spend less time navigating through the front-side bus and more time executing instructions, which will dramatically improve performance.
The shared cache design also allows Intel to eliminate some of the disadvantages of its front-side bus design, which many analysts see as a bottleneck in the dual-core era. The front-side bus is the connection between the processor and the main system memory via a chipset. On Intel's chips, this interface is located on the chipset, farther away from the CPU. Intel plans eventually to move to a different design, but in the meantime it has been raising the speed at which its buses move data in order to cope with the increased activity of two processor cores. Intel Core Duo's two cores will share a single front-side bus running at 667MHz.
Dual-Core processors provide a greater advantage over Hyper-Threading. In Hyper-Threading, parallel threads are executed on a single core using shared resources. With the Dual-Core solution, parallel threads are executed on separate cores with dedicated resources.
Intel Core Duo will use sophisticated power management techniques to make sure that each core is only drawing as much power as it needs to process its instructions. The processor can monitor the application activity passing through each core and allocate power as needed between the cores, reducing power consumption during idle moments. As a result, the battery life of notebooks with the Intel Core Duo and the rest of the Napa platform should exceed that of the current generation of Intel's Centrino technology.
Not so short an explanation after all...
Information from my study notes - just completed a certification exam on the technology used in Dell's XPS series notebooks.
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