Word reaches the Deeplung ear that Intel's Yonah processor, which ships under the Intel Core Duo moniker, has features that aren't being exposed to the consumer. Intel's Sossaman is the key, and Sossaman is the codename for an ultra low voltage Yonah to be shipped under the Xeon brand, into the server and workstation space.

And it transpires that Sossaman supports iAMD64, er, sorry, 'EM64T', symmetric multi-processing with another Sossaman Xeon, and hardware virtualisation. Intel's implementation of the 64-bit extension to x86, SMP and hardware VT are all missing from the official specs of Intel Core Duo consumer processors, despite Yonah and Sossaman being the same thing.

While hardware VT and SMP aren't really on the consumer radar for notebook users, the ability to move to a 64-bit version of Windows or Linux, with a supporting platform of course, surely appeals. It's therefore surprising to see Intel seem to hide away that ability in its Intel Core Duo chips, which now power a range of Apple products lest we forget.

Why so, Intel? Possibly even more beanworthy, especially if you love your CPU silicon as much as we do, is the whisper that Intel also engineered a version of Pentium-M with HyperThreading, 'back in the day'. While that matters little with the way the Core Duo platform has debuted, since it would seem to offer nothing that two complete cores can't do better, it's an interesting HEXUS.bean nonetheless, eh readers?

Hmmm ...