Core 2 Duo notebook release?

When would notebooks (that are widely sold of course) be equipped with the Core 2 Duo processor? I'm getting a new laptop soon and am willing to wait until early September for it.

 

You're probably out of luck then. While it's not unheard of for one or two manufacturers to have products ready on the launch date (August in this case), we're probably not going to see many Merom based notebooks until October or November.

There's been a lot of speculation that Yonah based notebooks will be upgradable to Merom via a CPU changeover/BIOS update, the jury's still out on this.

 

As in.. you just flash the Yonah BIOS with the Merom BIOS, and you have a Core 2 Duo? That would be SWEET!

Yet seeing that happen would be a far shot IMO; the companies would know this would cost them sales, so won't they try to block it? Or, they may figure that only the tech savvie users will know about it and the losses won't be a big loss... I hope the latter!

 

Sorry, I should have been more specific. That should read CPU changeover and BIOS update.

 

When you say "CPU changeover, does that mean actually, physically changing the CPU? Pardon my ignorance here my friend, I am fairly new with laptops.. but after reading around I thought that you couldn't change out the CPU in a laptop?

 

Yes, the Core 2 Duo and Core Duo chips fit in the same slot. I'd estimate October, Dell might have machines by Sept though.

 

Oh well. Too bad then. Guess I'd either go with a Core Duo or Turion X2. Thanks for the replies.

 

Brian, does this mean that if I were to buy a Built on Asus Core Duo laptop today and put a Merom chip into it later, the system would work fine?

 

Intel's own product briefs claim that existing Yonah platforms will be compatible with Merom. Noone will know for sure until some daredevil actually tries it because as was mentioned before, even if it's physically compatible pin for pin the trick will be getting a BIOS flashed that will recognize it.