IDF Intel will ship a clock-unlocked gamer-friendly Core 2 Duo mobile processor in the second-half of the year, the company has revealed. Next month's new Core 2 Duos will auto-overclock, it added. But while Quad-core laptop CPUs are coming too, Intel didn't say when.

The overclockable Core 2 Duo is the anticipated Core 2 Extreme for gaming notebooks, though Intel mobility chief Mooly Eden mentioned the brand name only tacitly. But since it was talking about "taking mobile gaming to the Extreme", it's hard to imagine that it won't used the desktop-coined Extreme moniker.

It wil be an "ass-kicking" product, Eden claimed, though he admitted it's only for those "who know how to cool it".

As we reported earlier today, Intel looks set to update the desktop Core 2 Extreme to a 3GHz model in Q3.

Eden also pledged the laptop-friendly processor line would go from two cores to four "in the future", but didn't specify even broadly when we might see such a product on store shelves.

The on-the-fly overclocking system - Intel calls it Dynamic Acceleration Technology (DAT) - will appear sooner. It allows the CPU to run at a higher frequency than marked, "guaranteed" clock speed, but within the chip's heat-emission limits. That's achieved by only overclocking one core when the other is operating on reduced power, ensuring the higher consumption of core one is balanced by the reduced consumption of core two.

This will particularly appeal to gamers since many if not most games are still single-threaded, so only run on a single core.

DAT will be incorporated into the updated 65nm Core 2 Duo processors due next month as part of Intel's 'Santa Rosa' Centrino revamp.