Memory performance
In the results below and throughout much of the article, I've highlighted the Core Duo in bright colors and the rest of the mobile processors in slightly duller colors, so they're easier to pick out of the crowd.

With their slower bus speeds and more conservative memory subsystems, the mobile processors have less peak memory throughput than their desktop counterparts. However, the Core Duo is at the top of the bunch of mobile processors, limited mainly by its 667MHz front-side bus.

Our version of Linpack isn't highly optimized for scientific computing, but it can give us a nice look at the "shape" of the L1 and L2 caches on these processors. The Core Duo's combination of L2 cache bandwidth, cache size, and floating-point math prowess leads to the highest sustained throughput of any of these CPUs. Also, Core Duo's cache sharing is at work. Although our single-threaded Linpack test runs on just one CPU core, the Core Duo's effective L2 cache size shows up here as 2MB; performance doesn't drop off at larger matrix sizes as it does on the Athlon 64 FX-60, for instance, which has a 1MB L2 cache per core.

Despite its fast L2 cache and relatively high memory bandwidth for a mobile CPU, the Core Duo's memory access latencies are the highest of the group. The Turion 64, with a single channel of DDR400 memory hanging off of its on-chip memory controller, has access latencies that are half those of the Core Duo. The results of these synthetic tests don't directly dictate real-world performance, though, and Intel has taken steps to mask memory access latencies in the Duo.