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 core 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.