The Core microarchitecture returned to lower clock rates and improved the usage of both available clock cycles and power when compared with the preceding NetBurst microarchitectue of the Pentium 4/D-branded CPUs.[2] The Core microarchitecture provides more efficient decoding stages, execution units, caches, and buses, reducing the power consumption of Core 2-branded CPUs, while increasing their processing capacity. Intel's CPUs have varied wildly in power consumption according to clock rate, architecture, and semiconductor process, shown in the CPU power dissipation tables.

Core-based microprocessors do not have Hyper-threading Technology found in Pentium 4 processors. This is because the core microarchitecture is a descendant of the P6 microarchitecture used by Pentium III, Celeron and Xeon processors based on it. Core 2 also lacks an L3 cache found in the Galllatin core of Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, Although an L3 cache is present in high-end versions of Core-based Xeons and Hyper-threading is present on select Atom processors. Both an L3 cache and Hyper-threading is present in current Nehalem and future Westmere processors.