Digital Home Thoughts: CrunchGear Dishes on Intel's 45nm Penryn Processors

"Everybody’s excited about Intel’s new 45nm chip architecture and its first iteration, the Penryns. They’re going to be in the MacBooks, they’re going to be in your desktops, they’re basically taking the joint over and everyone’s pumped. You’re probably wondering why. Isn’t it just another bump in processor speed? No, it’s a bit better than that - read on and find out why 45nm is a major step for Intel. First, it’s important to understand what 45nm means. This new process is essentially a further miniaturization of transistor technology, which all computer chips are based on. 65nm has been the standard for a couple years now, and Intel’s chips have been, in their multitudes, based on the same base-level recipe - or rather, on the same cake mold. The various versions - mobile, desktop, server, multi-core, all have the same underlying transistor technology, but customized for different tasks. In any case, 45nm is the new basic building block they’ll be working with."



CrunchGear's Devin Coldewey gives us a layman's breakdown of what's coming with Intel's Penryn CPUs. Die-shrinks, meaning going from 65nm down to 45nm, is a very big deal - it's the "tock" in Intel's "tick tock" strategy; the major stroke. What we're going to see is higher clock speeds, lower power usage, more and faster L2 cache (which translates to enhanced performance), and new SSE instruction sets that will enhance multimedia encoding and playback. What surprises me the most? We're still not seeing a CPU with a dedicated h.264 encoding core (true hardware acceleration) - maybe there are a dozen technical reasons why that can't happen, but if not, it would sure be nice to see.