Today Intel officially launched the Core 2 Duo processor for mobile platforms. Based on the Merom core, Core 2 Duo is arguably the industry's most anticipated mobile processor launch of this year. Judging from performance comparisons of its desktop counterpart, Conroe, Core 2 Duo should deliver some very impressive performance benchmarks in notebooks, which will also be announced this week. While Intel had a launch party for Core 2 Duo earlier last month, today marks the official day when products with Core 2 Duo processors become available. Expect major manufacturers such as Dell, Lenovo, Sony and others to release notebooks based on the new platform.

Actual specifications for Merom and Conroe remain nearly identical with the majority of Core 2 Duo processors coming with 4MB of L2 cache and running on an 800MHz front-side bus. Even low-voltage versions of Core 2 Duo such as the L7500 model will run on an 800MHz front-side bus and come with 4MB of L2 cache. Core speed however is reduced from 2.2GHz in the T7500 model down to 1.6GHz in the L7500 model. All Core 2 Duo processors will be virtualization technology enabled and be fully prepared to run 64-bit applications. Like Conroe, the 4MB of L2 cache is shared between the two processor cores.

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