The First Mobile Dual-Core
In 2006, Intel announced the Core Duo. The first dual-core processor for portable PCs boasted excellent performance—much better than the Pentium 4. It was also one of the first x86 processors to be truly dual-core. The cache, for example, is shared (whereas the Pentium D was more like an assembly of two processors in the same package). This processor was part of the Centrino Duo platform and was a huge success. The only drawback was that it was still a 32-bit processor, unlike the Pentium 4.
| Code name | Yonah |
| Date released | 2006 |
| Architecture | 32 bits |
| Data bus | 64 bits |
| Address bus | 32 bits |
| Maximum memory | 4 GB |
| L1 cache | 32 KB + 32 KB |
| L2 cache | 2,048 KB shared |
| Clock frequency | 1.06–2.33 GHz |
| FSB | 667 MHz |
| SIMD | MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3 |
| SMT/SMP | Dual core |
| Fabrication process | 65 nm |
| Number of transistors | 151 million |
| TDP | 9-31 W |
| Voltage | 0.9–1.3 V |
| Die surface area | 91 mm² |
| Connector | Socket 479 |
A Core Solo version with one core was also made available, and the low-power-consumption versions used a 533 MHz bus (133 MHz QDR) instead of 667 MHz. This processor was used in servers (code name Sossaman), which was a first for a processor originally intended for the mobile world. Note that this processor didn’t officially use the Core architecture of the Core 2 Duo, and it was quickly replaced by the Core 2 Duo (Merom) in portable PCs. Also, the Yonah’s Socket 479 is different from the Socket 479 of other Pentium M processors.
