Intel’s first 45nm processor has been code-named Penryn and is based on the company’s current Core 2 architecture. One might mistake this for simply being a move to a finer manufacturing process and nothing else, but according to Intel there’s a lot more to it. Intel has now released some more information about Penryn and, among others, it speaks of clock frequencies over 3.0GHz and a processor bus at up to 1600MHz. Penryn will also offer better performance than today’s Core 2 processors at the same frequency, not just because of its larger L2 cache (6MB per chip) and SSE4 instructions but also a faster divider.
There seems to be more then plenty of performance improvements as well, if we’re to believe Intel’s internal tests.
“Gelsinger said they’d measured a 3.2GHz desktop part at 20% higher gaming performance than the current fastest Conroe. For applications that use SSE4, like media encoding, we can expect to see improvements of over 40%.”
We’re looking forward to comparing Penryn to AMD’s Barcelona core, which will also offer some big performance improvements. At TechReport they’ve published some more detailed information about Intel’s coming Penryn.