It‘s been a little over a month since Intel launched it’s new Core Duo processor. Despite some minor glitches, they were generally well received. A number of new notebooks has been launched by major manufacturers and a great deal more is coming. Now Japanese site PC Watch has obtained Intel’s internal roadmaps for the new chips, which helps figure out Intels steps for next year.

Currently Intel is shipping four different models of Core Duo’s: 1.66GHz T2300, 1.83GHz T2400, 2GHz T2500 and 2.16GHz T2600. Intel also has announced, but is yet to ship it’s low voltage Core Duo chips L2300 and L2400. These processors will have 1.50 and 1.66 GHz clock speeds with 2M L2 cache, 667 FSB’s and will consume 50% less power then current T line of processors. They should get to market this month.

Intel doesn’t have any plans to debut any more new Core Duo chips in the first half of the year and will probably concentrate on tweaking and marketing T and L lines of processors.

Faster Core Duo chips will appear in Q3. At the end of summer Intel will launch 2.33 GHz T2700 and low power 1.83 GHz L2500 processors. They will command about $200 price premium over slower rivals, and will push them one step down the price ladder. So 2.16GHz will cost the same as 2GHz Core Duo now. For that quarter Intel also has plans for Ultra Low Voltage Core Duo chips. The processors, labeled U2500 will have 1.06 GHz clock speed, 2M cache and consume less then 10W of power.

In Q4 Intel will debut next generation “Merom” dual core chips for notebooks. This fall Intel will launch 4 different Merom processors: 2.33 GHz T7600, 2.16GHz, T7400 and 2GHz T7200 with 4M cache and 1.83 GHz T5600 with 2M cache. Low voltage version of Merom is expected to debut early next year.

Next we will look at what kind of notebooks we can expect this year.