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Following the path of the Pentium brand, the next-gen Core chips will come under the Core 2 Duo banner.

Processors formerly known as Conroe will make up the desktop range, launching as either 4000 Series or 6000 Series chips, while those built under the Merom branch will go into notebooks as 5000 Series or 7000 Series processors. Both run very similar microarchitectures with the main difference being how much power they guzzle. Each chip will also brandish a model number that indicates

The new processors will be manufactured to Intel's 65nm processes. Intel claims the chips offer the industry's largest integrated cache with its Intel Advanced Smart Cache feature. The chips will also offer hardware support for security, virtualisation and remote management and diagnostics.

However, Intel has been increasing shifting its branding weight to platforms rather than individual processor ranges, so many of these new chips will be bought as part of the consumer desktop Viiv systems, Centrino notebooks and vPro business desktops.

'With this unified PC and notebook brand and microarchitecture, everyone will have a simple way to choose the most powerful and energy-efficient processors in the world, and developers will be able to more easily write optimized software just once for a variety of computing segments,' said Eric Kim, Intel senior vice president and chief marketing officer. 'We want these processors to be the heart and soul of computers that are increasingly bringing magic to our digital lifestyles.'