Inside the Machine

Chapter 12. Intel's Pentium M, Core Duo, and Core 2 Duo

In March 2003, Intel officially launched the Pentium M, a new x86 processor designed specifically for the mobile computing market. The Pentium M was a success from both performance and power efficiency perspectives, with the result that the immediate successor to the Pentium M, called Core Duo, made its way out of the portable niche and into desktop computers.

Core Duo’s combination of high performance and low power consumption made it clearly superior to processors based on Intel’s aging Netburst microarchitecture, and in the fall of 2005, Intel announced plans to unify its entire x86 product line, from portables all the way up to servers, on the follow-up to Core Duo: a brand new, power-efficient, ...