Although Intel Core is a brand that promises no internal consistency or continuity, the processors within this family have been, for the most part, broadly similar.

The first Intel Core desktop processor—and typical family member—came from the Conroe iteration, a 65 nm dual-core design brought to market in July 2006, based on the Intel Core microarchitecture with substantial enhancements in micro-architectural efficiency and performance, outperforming Pentium 4 across the board (or near to it), while operating at drastically lower clock rates.

Maintaining high instructions per cycle (IPC) on a deeply pipelined and resourced out-of-order execution engine has remained a constant fixture of the Intel Core product group ever since.

Its dual-core layout closely resembled two interconnected Pentium M branded CPUs packaged as a single die (piece) silicon chip (IC).

Core Duo signified the beginning of Apple's shift to Intel processors across the entire Mac line.

The original U2xxx series "Merom-L" used a special version of the Merom chip with CPUID number 10661 (model 22, stepping A1) that only had a single core and was also used in some Celeron processors.

The later SU3xxx are part of Intel's CULV range of processors in a smaller μFC-BGA 956 package but contain the same Penryn chip as the dual-core variants, with one of the cores disabled during manufacturing.

The mobile Core 2 Duo processors with an 'S' prefix in the name are produced in a smaller μFC-BGA 956 package, which allows building more compact laptops.

Within each line, a higher number usually refers to a better performance, which depends largely on core and front-side bus clock frequency and amount of second level cache, which are model-specific.

[40] According to motherboard manufacturer Supermicro, if a Core i3 processor is used with a server chipset platform such as Intel 3400/3420/3450, the CPU supports ECC with UDIMM.

[44][45] Lynnfield Core i5 processors have an 8 MB L3 cache, a DMI bus running at 2.5 GT/s and support for dual-channel DDR3-800/1066/1333 memory and have Hyper-threading disabled.

A new feature called Turbo Boost Technology was introduced which maximizes speed for demanding applications, dynamically accelerating performance to match the workload.

The initial set of Sandy Bridge processors includes dual- and quad-core variants, all of which use a single 32 nm die for both the CPU and integrated GPU cores, unlike the earlier microarchitectures.

With the mobile version, the thermal design power can no longer be determined from a one- or two-letter suffix but is encoded into the CPU number.

While they require new sockets and chipsets, the user-visible features of the Core i3 are largely unchanged, including the lack of support for Turbo Boost and AES-NI.

Unlike the Sandy Bridge-based Celeron and Pentium processors, the Core i3 line does support the new Advanced Vector Extensions.

In January 2011, Intel released new quad-core Core i5 processors based on the "Sandy Bridge" microarchitecture at CES 2011.

Ivy Bridge is the codename for a "third generation" line of processors based on the 22 nm manufacturing process developed by Intel.

Broadwell is the fifth generation Core processor microarchitecture, and was released by Intel on September 6, 2014, and began shipping in late 2014.

[66] With the latest generation of microarchitecture, Intel decided to produce Kaby Lake processors without using their "tick–tock" manufacturing and design model.

[67] Built on an improved 14 nm process (14FF+), Kaby Lake features faster CPU clock speeds and Turbo frequencies.

branding clock rate cache Coffee Lake is a codename for the eighth generation Intel Core family and was launched in October 2017.

For the first time in the ten-year history of Intel Core processors, the Coffee Lake generation features an increase in core counts across the desktop lineup of processors, a significant driver of improved performance versus previous generations despite similar per-clock performance.

[83][84] At CES 2018, Intel announced that they had started shipping mobile Cannon Lake CPUs at the end of 2017 and that they would ramp up production in 2018.

Ice Lake are the first Intel CPUs to feature in-silicon mitigations for the hardware vulnerabilities discovered in 2017, Meltdown and Spectre.

[119] CPUs in bold below feature ECC memory support only when paired with a motherboard based on the W680 chipset according to each respective Intel Ark product page.

Starting with the Meteor Lake mobile series launched in December 2023 (with the exception of Raptor Lake-HX Refresh),[120] Intel introduced a new naming system for its new and upcoming processors.

[125] Due to its Multi-Chip Module (MCM) construction, Meteor Lake can take advantage of different process nodes that are best suited to the use case.

[126][127] The 22FFL Fin Field-Effect Transistor (FinFET) Low-power node, first announced in March 2017, was designed for inexpensive low power operation.

[139] Many reviewers also noticed that the processors had multiple bugs at launch, and inconsistent performance caused by certain BIOS configurations.