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. Merom is Intel's premier line of mobile processors, with largely the same features as Conroe but with more emphasis on low power consumption to enhance notebook battery life. Merom provides 20% more performance yet maintains the same battery life as the Yonah-based Core Duo. Merom is the first Intel mobile processor to feature the EM64T 64-bit architecture.
The first version of Merom is drop-in compatible with the prior Core Duo platform, requiring at most a BIOS update. It has the same thermal envelope and the same 667 MT/s bus rate.
The Merom processors are labeled as the "T5x00" and "T7x00" Core 2 Duo models, with the T5200 clocked at 1.60 GHz, the T5500 clocked at 1.66 GHz, the T5600 clocked at 1.83 GHz, the T7200 clocked at 2.0 GHz, the T7400 clocked at 2.16 GHz, and the T7600 clocked at 2.33 GHz. The T5x00 models come with 2 MiB of shared L2 cache, and the T7x00 models come with 4 MiB of shared L2 cache. Both have the Intel product code 80537.
