Merom (microprocessor)

Merom, the first mobile version of the Core 2, was officially released on July 27, 2006, but quietly began shipping to PC manufacturers in mid-July, alongside Conroe.[1][2] Merom became Intel's premier line of mobile processors, with mostly the same features as Conroe, but with a greater emphasis on low power consumption to enhance notebook battery life. Merom-based Core 2 Duo provides a slight performance increase associated with 3D rendering and media-encoding tasks,[3] yet maintains the same battery life as the Yonah-based Core Duo. Merom is the first Intel mobile processor to feature Intel 64 architecture.

The first version of Merom is "drop-in" compatible with Napa platform for Core Duo, requiring at most a motherboard BIOS update. It has a similar thermal envelope of 34 W and the same 667 MT/s FSB rate.[4] The Merom die features 4 MB L2 cache, half of which is deactivated in the T5xx0 CPUs. A native 2 MB L2 version of the Merom core, called Merom-2M, was rolled out in early 2007 as a counterpart to Allendale. The Merom-2M core uses the steppings L2 and M0 and the ultra-low-voltage versions of the Core 2 Duo use this core.

A second wave of Merom processors featuring an 800 MT/s FSB and using the new Socket P was launched on May 9, 2007.[5] These chips are part of Santa Rosa platform.[6] Low voltage versions were also released on May 9, 2007.

Merom (מרום) is the Hebrew word for a higher plane of existence or a level of heaven; BaMerom (במרום) means "in the heavens". The name was chosen by the Intel team in Haifa, Israel, who designed this processor.

The Core 2 Extreme Mobile processor, based on the Merom XE core, is a mobile CPU designed for laptops. It was released in two models, the X7900 and the X7800. These feature an 800 MT/s FSB. The X7800, introduced on July 16, 2007,[7] is clocked at 2.6 GHz and costs around $851 for OEMs. The processor features a 44 W TDP and requires the new Intel Centrino (Santa Rosa) platform. The X7900, introduced on August 22, 2007, is clocked at 2.8 GHz.

The X7900 processor was used in the top-end iMacs released on August 7, 2007.

The mobile version of the Allendale desktop processor is often called Merom-2M to identify the smaller L2 cache. Some T5xxx and T7xxx processors have come out with both Merom and Merom-2M dies, which can only be distinguished through their stepping number.

The Merom-L processor is based on the same model as Conroe-L but is used in mobile Socket M and Socket P systems as Celeron 5xx and Core 2 Solo U2xxx, some of which also use regular Merom and Merom-2M chips with one core disabled in contrast to the real Merom-L that only has 1 MB L2 cache and a single core. The CPUID is family 6 model 23 (10661h), which is between Merom and Penryn.

The first Core 2 Solo processors were launched in Q3 2007 and consisted of the U2100 and U2200, which run at 1.06 and 1.2 GHz, respectively. They both feature a 533 MT/s FSB and are part of Intel's ULV family, running at only 5 W. Like the rest of the Core 2 family, they are 64-bit compatible. They were released with compatibility for the Napa platform rather than the newer Santa Rosa platform due to power consumption concerns.[8]