Core Duo vs. Core 2 Duo

Two days after the official introduction of the Core 2 Duo Merom, the mobile version of the Core 2 Duo Conroe (not currently used in Macs yet), many websites have published tests.
The first good news is its price, identical to Yonah CPU at equivalent clockspeed. Intel will of course in the coming days decrease the price of Core Duo CPUs.
Second good news: if the Merom TDP is 34W instead of 31W for an identically clocked 2.16GHz Yonah, the Core 2 Duo sports improved energy management, a doubled cache memory and 64-bit addressing support. Performance are also improved compare to the Yonah by at least 10%, but can reach more than 20%.
So overall the battery lifespan might really be improved with a Merom-based MBP compared to a Yonah-based MBP.
So, this new mobile processor from Intel, is not a revolution, but a good evolution. For Apple, it will simply be the first notebook-dedicated CPU supporting 64-bits to find its way in MBP (and maybe in other hardware models); the question being: when will Cupertino announce it? There are enough events in a near future (such as Amsterdam-IBC, Paris AppleExpo) to be a good opportunity to upgrade the current MBP models.
It is also for us Mac users, a revolution, because we might see our Macs evolving much faster at the CPU level than it has never been in the past during the PPC era. This does not mean that the average lifespan of our Macs will be shorter, if Apple use the best CPU from Intel, performance will always be there, and decay will be slow down. It will anyway be strongly compensated by the possibilityoffered with most desktop MacIntel to upgrade CPUs ourselves (when it is possible).
If you wish to read some tests comparing Core Duo vs. Core 2 Duo: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2808 and http://www.hothardware.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=864&cid=10