Yonah is a notebook chip coming from Intel in the first part of next year, which is going to be a lot different than its predecessors, according to Intel.

The chip will be made on the 65-nanometer process and will come with a number of enhancements over the current Pentium M line of notebook chips.

Yonah will contain two cores that will share a 2MB cache. Current notebooks have single core CPU. The enhancement here is that sharing the cache is expected to boost performance. Even current dual-core desktop chips from AMD and Intel come with similar sized caches, but each core accesses only 1MB of cache memory dedicated to it.

Intel spokperson claims that the dual-core chip will offer a 10-20% performance improvement.

Yonah will also come with improved technology for curbing power consumption and heat dissipation. It will also sport features currently found on desktops to enhance security.

Partly because of reduced power consumption, the footprint on Yonah notebooks will be up to 31 percent smaller than those of existing notebooks. By 2008, Intel's goal is to reduce power consumption in notebooks overall to the point where machines can run for eight hours on a single battery charge.

A single-core version of Yonah will also come out for budget notebooks. One thing Yonah won't have, at least initially, is the ability to run 64-bit applications.

Yonah will also contain more transistors--151.6 million--than the current Pentium M, which has about 140 million transistors. Still, because it will be produced on the more advanced 65-nanometer process, Yonah will be smaller and therefore cost less to produce.

The chip will be paired with a chipset, called Calistoga, and a Wi-Fi module, called Golan, that will receive and send 802.11a, b and g. Later versions will come with 802.11n, the so-called MIMO technology. Wimax will start to be added i proprietary 1-Bit digital amplifier.