The Core 2 Duo architecture follows closely on the heels of Intel's first mobile dual-core offering, the Core Duo, which launched this past winter. As the name implies, these chips squeeze two independent computing engines (or "cores") onto a single CPU to improve overall performance. That tack is a departure from the cycle of ever-increasing clock speeds that had been the road to faster performance since the CPU's inception. The reason for the strategy shift: Faster-clocked processors by their nature run hotter and require more energy than do slower-clocked chips-a double-whammy for mobile designs, where most of the growth in the PC industry is coming from for the foreseeable future.
Enter dual-core technology, which in essence packs two CPUs onto a single piece of silicon. That said, a dual-core chip doesn't offer twice the performance on a given application; instead, it handles two simultaneous tasks far better than a single-core chip can. So if all you are doing is word processing, you won't notice a difference between a dual-core laptop and one equipped with, say, an Intel Core Solo processor.
But start an anti-virus scan in the background and then switch to a computational-intensive task such as gaming or video-editing, and the benefits of a dual-core CPU become evident. Also, certain high-end applications (Adobe Photoshop most famous among them) are true multithreaded apps, meaning they can take advantage of a dual-core processor if it is present.
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