Intel Sheds Light on "Penryn" Enhancements
 

Intel plans to unleash its Penryn family processors next quarter, shortly after AMD releases Barcelona. Penryn is the umbrella for all 45nm Core 2 micro architecture products, including quad-core Xeon Harpertown, quad-core Core 2 Yorkfield and dual-core Xeon, Core 2 Wolfdale processors.

On the surface, Penryn looks like die shrink of last year’s Conroe micro architecture, but Intel sought additional tweaks to the micro architecture to achieve greater performance at the same clock speeds as Conroe processors.

Penryn follows Intel’s plans of alternating between new fabrication processes and a completely new core within two years. Intel previously released its 65nm fabrication process with the last of its Netburst Pentium D and Xeon DP processors, with Conroe, a new architecture, following months after. Once again, Penryn is a die shrink of Conroe set to debut Intel’s 45nm fabrication process.

Following Penryn is a new Nehalem architecture, based on 45nm with Intel’s new QuickPath technology, formerly known as common-system interface. Nehalem is set for a 2008 introduction, beginning with the Xeon family for servers and workstations. Intel plans to shrink Nehalem to 32nm with the Westmere core. Following Westmere is Sandy Bridge, a new micro architecture based on 32nm.

Expect Intel to debut Penryn later this year with the Xeon family.

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