This seems to be the confusion of many people today and most of them don’t actually know the difference between Intel’s Core 2 Duo, Dual Core, Core Duo and also Pentium D processors.


Let’s see the differences between them:
In a simple language, all these processors listed above are Dual Core processors in general.

•    The processor Pentium D is just the two Pentium 4 Prescott processors inefficiently paired together that run as a dual core.

•    Core Duo is a first generation dual core processor from Intel that is based on the Pentium M processor and is mostly made for laptops. This is a much better processor than Pentium D processors and is a 32-bit processor.

•    Core 2 Duo is Intel’s second generation processor and is made for both Laptops and Desktops. This is a fast processor that consumes the minimum power as compared to the above CPUs. It is a 64-bit processor.

•    Dual Core is nothing but a term referring to a processor package with two physical processors in one.

The other big difference among them is based on Cache memory.
While the Dual Core has a dedicated cache memory, the Core 2 Duo has a shared one. Thus Dual Core is generally better.