AMD, Intel's primary competition in the x86 market, retained the performance crown through most of the NetBurst era. Some have even said that AMD's success in recent years owes a great deal to Intel itself "losing it's way" in its commitment to NetBurst. Still, Intel wasn't without a Plan B, and had an alternative to work with courtesy of their mobile architecture development team in Haifa, Israel.

This part of the story begins with the Banias core, Intel's first generation of it's Pentium M architecture. Sharing lineage with the Pentium Pro architecture and directly deriving from the Tualatin Pentium III, the M's design philosophy focused on getting a lot done per clock and low power consumption. With ever-increasing clock rates and thermal envelopes, combined with the huge growth in the mobile computing category, offering good performance and good battery life in the mobile segment was critical. Needless to say, the Banias core did this very well. At the same time, the CPU became a favorite of many due to its ability to outperform the Pentium 4s of the time in many applications.

Banias itself was available in clock speeds ranging from 1.3 GHz to 1.7 GHz. Dothan, the next mobile core, brought many improvements to the Pentium M/Centrino brand. These increases included additional clock speed increases up to 2.26 GHz, larger L2 caches, smaller die sizes and even lower power consumption.

Dothan's successor Yonah is the last of these architectures to be dedicated to mobile computing. This iteration is available as the Core Duo, which is a dual core version, and the Core Solo that is the same package with one core disabled. Core Duo CPUs have 2MB of shared L2 cache, an arbitration bus unit that handles cache coherency traffic issues over the FSB, and Intel's SSE3 instruction set. The Core Duo and Core Solo CPUs are largely responsible for Intel's utter dominance of mobile computing, despite stiff competition from AMD's Turion offerings. Additionally, these important mobile architectures are the progenitors of Intel's new desktop and server architectures, Intel Core2.