This process is synonymous to the way in HyperThreading used to work - the active core takes the extra TDP headroom from the idle core to gain the increased performance.

The new Mobile 965 Express chipset family brings support for the new sleep states and dynamic speed switching of the enhanced mobile Core 2 Duo. There's also increased Serial ATA I/O bandwidth at 3Gbps, extra USB 2.0 port support and the Matrix storage controller improves its rapid recovery technology.

The differences between the Pro and Duo versions of the new Centrino can be summed up as additional security for and control over the Pro user. Remote administrator services are also enhanced with Intel's version 2.5 of its Active Management Technology (AMT) bringing additional over-LAN firmware addressing functions for diagnostic discovery, healing and protecting.

To receive the Pro brand over the standard Duo, Intel's 82566MM Gigabit Networking Connection with AMT 2.5 firmware and a Virtualisation Technology capable BIOS should be present. Both wired and wireless LAN management is capable.

With several wireless technologies, Intel has made some judgement calls as to which integrated support would be most suitable. It already called off support for 3G on pricing grounds and WiMax wasn't quite ready - if you require these, then both can be added later through either ExpressCard of mini-card PCI Express add-on boards.

The new Wi-Fi Link 4965AGN provides quad A/B/G and draft-N support giving you the maximum currently available data transfer speeds, MIMO (multiple in/multiple out) support, as well as the added bonus of support on the less-used 5GHz bandwidth when using 802.11a.

To quash any doubts over pre-ratification support for draft-N, Intel has undergone interoperability tests with major wireless kit manufacturers producing the 'Connect with Centrino' badge which will be on kits that pass the test.

How does overall laptop performance now fare under this revision? The Front Side Bus gets a speed hike to 800MHz. Yes the desktop is currently dizzying at 1066MHz, but again a 35W TDP is Intel's target here and maybe an Extreme Edition will be allowed to burst through this barrier.

Performance, despite the massive amount of wattage shaved, was as we'd expect for a system of this strength. Though Vista has proven to make our more reliable benchmarks curl into a ball, we did get a good showing out of PCMark 04.

The better of our two test machines did its job perfectly, utilising Turbo Memory to extract an ever-increasing benchmark score; by the fourth run, it earned 4114, a fraction higher than the non-TM score of 3981.

Unlike other Centrino releases, this new platform doesn't come with a new processor revision, but this doesn't matter. Now Centrino defines the laptop platform of choice with a set of features designed to attend to the needs of mobile computing.

With this release, Intel's lead over AMD and VIA has extended with only the cheapest of laptops likely to feature non-Intel CPUs. But for any laptop user with needs beyond the most basic of requirements, only a Centrino laptop will do.