Digital Home Thoughts: Intel's 45 nm Penryn CPU: 4 GHz Air Cooled

"Rarely have things looked as good for Intel as they do right now. Exactly 18 months after the introduction of Intel's highly successful Core 2 CPUs, the chipmaker is updating them. It is shrinking the structures from 65 nm to 45 nm (Penryn refers to Intel's new family of 45 nm CPUs, dual and quad core), and is already preparing the next step: the transition to the Nehalem platform. However, that's all still in the future, and won't come to pass until the end of 2008 at the earliest. The revision of the Conroe architecture - in order to boost its performance, incorporate new instructions, and, most importantly, reduce power consumption - is right on schedule. Until now, Intel's Core 2 processors always played second fiddle to AMD's Athlon 64 X2 processors when it came to power consumption, at least in idle operation. That was also the reason why we built our Solar-Powered PC around an AMD platform. However, this situation has changed with the Penryn core of Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX9650."



That is a huge article but oh my God, I am so impressed with the new Intel chips. The article concludes that the new set of chips, well in addition to the sweet 4GHz that you can get with simple overclocking and no need for liquid cooling, generate less noise, are more efficiency, are faster and have far more overclocking potential. But the even better part of all this is that I have faith that AMD will probably, in an effort to one-up Intel, announce a pretty sweet line of chips soon enough.