Following the slight decline in the notebook microprocessors market share in the fourth quarter, Intel Corp. has quietly released two new mobile chips with low power consumption that are the company’s first low voltage Core 2 Duo chips and which also increases performance of low-voltage dual-core processors.

Without putting in the new chips into the price-list and without issuing any official statements, Intel has added the Core 2 Duo for notebooks processor models L7400 (1.50GHz, 667MHz processor system bus [PSB], 4MB L2 cache) and L7200 (1.33GHz, 667MHz PSB, 4MB L2 cache) into the family.

The new mobile Intel Core 2 Duo microprocessors L7000-series have thermal design power (TDP) of 17W, which is two times lower compared to typical Core 2 Duo chips that typically consume 34W, which is quite a lot for processors designed for laptops.

Still, the new products are not the most economical offerings from Intel Corp. Intel currently also sells Intel Core Duo U2400 (1.06GHz, 2MB unified L2 cache, 533MHz PSB) processor that typically consumes 9W as well as two ultra low-voltage Celeron M processor models 423 (single-core “Yonah”, 1.07GHz, 1MB cache, 533MHz PSB) and 373 (single-core “Dothan”, 1.0GHz, 512KB cache, 400MHz PSB) with 5.5W TDP. In addition, there are Intel Core Duo L-series products that have TDP of about 15W.

But despite of higher power consumption, the new Intel Core 2 Duo processors for notebooks L7000-series still have quite a lot of chances to gain market acceptance, as forthcoming low-power small-profile notebooks running Microsoft Windows Vista operating system will definitely require high performance offered by the Core 2 Duo chips amid relatively low power consumption.