Intel’s New Penryn Chip To Ship By End Of 2007 In Macs
Intel Corp. has unveiled Penryn, a new 45 nanometer processor that utilizes a blend of hafnium and other rare metals in its transistors to keep the flow of electricity in check, reducing the amount of power leakage by as much as ten times over today’s Core 2 and Xeon processors. The announcement is especially exciting for fans of Apple computers since the new processor should be shipping in Macs by the end of 2007.
The technology will allow as many as 800 million transistors to fit on to a single chip in a quad-core version, while still cutting back on the heat and power levels that tax most CPUs to their limit.
While fundamentally a mirror of the Core 2 architecture introduced in mid-2006, Penryn’s nearly doubled chip density compared to existing 65 nanometer versions both reduces the delays in crunching instructions and leaves space for more features. The updated chips will contain a whopping 12MB of second-level cache on a dual-core model, up 50 percent from the Core 2 Duo. All this will be possible while continuing to ramp up clock speeds and improve power management.
