MacRumors.com

Intel is shipping Core 2 Duo Mobile chips (Merom) to manufacturers, according to recent Intel financial report. A recent AppleInsider story had indicated that Intel may have plans to move up Merom's formal launch to next Monday, July 23rd, to coincide with the Core 2 Duo Desktop variant ("Conroe") launch. Despite the move, availablility at the time was still not expected until August.

Merom is expected to replace Core Duo "Yonah" CPUs found in the MacBook Pro. Apple could use the 2.0, 2.16, or the 2.33 GHz variants of Merom in its MacBook Pro line, each of which sport 4 MB of L2 Cache (up from 2 MB in current MacBook Pros) and have a 667 MHz frontside bus.