Intel formally announced its latest mobile processor on Monday, rounding out its entire processor family with the company's most advanced architecture to date.

The new Core 2 Duo processor, previously known as the Merom, promises to increase performance of mobile computers while boasting the same power-efficiency of previous generation chips.

For laptops, Intel mobility senior vice president David Perlmutter said, the new processor has doubled the performance, giving consumers and businesses an immersive mobile experience while keeping power consumption and battery life unchanged.

The new chip follows the trend of other high-performance processors, offering multiple cores, enabling tasks to be executed simultaneously. This philosophy leads to cooler running chips, and more responsive computers, according to experts.

Intel's announcement follows a line of other high-profile product releases as the company upgrades its products to next-generation architecture.

In June, the world's-largest semi-conductor firm unveiled it's flagship chip dubbed Woodcrest, using new technology and ground-up design. Hailing it as a technical marvel ushering in a new era of computing, the firm released the desktop equivalent, Conroe, only one month later.

Not since Intel introduced the Pentium processor has the industry seen the heart of the computer reinvented like this, said Paul Otellini, president and CEO of Intel when the desktop processor was released at the end of July.

In previous generations, Intel has strived to get its chips to do less work, extremely quickly, however its new chips run at slower speeds, but work faster. This change is giving them the edge.

Intel clearly appears to be in a strong, if not leadership, position, Eric Gomberg of Thomas Weisel Equity Research said.

The firms largest competitor, Advanced Micro Devices, has not stood still, releasing products of its own this summer, however Intel's new Core 2 Duo will strengthen its grip on the mobile market.

Intel already has a commanding 87 percent of the mobile market share, increasing from 86.3 percent from the first quarter of this year, according to Mercury Research. On top of this, AMD is struggling to offer competitive mobile chips.

Merril Lynch's Joe Osha believes Intel's new Core based processors should help the company gain even more share in the future.

With the introduction of new generation of microprocessors...we expect Intel to regain market share in the second half of this year, he said.

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