Intel has finally unveiled its 45nm architecture also known as Penryn. We reported a while back about how AMD was bragging about its Barcelona architecture, an architecture that will arrive later this year, but now the turn has come to Intel. Intel has more than words and theoretical figures to present though. During its press event it had five systems you could test and play with, all running Penryns; a laptop, two desktops, one dual-core and one quad-core, and two workstations, whereof one was a dual quad-core. The focus was on Intel’s progress with its High-K Metal Gate transistors though.
That Intel is up to speed with starting to manufacture 45nm processors during the second half of 2007 is no news, but the thing that has made this possible is the new transistor. The difference between a traditional transistor and this one is that the the dielectric gate now consists out of high-k material instead of silicon, while the gate is made from hafnium instead of silicon oxide. In practice this means that Intel will be able to use the current through the transistor more efficiently and at the same time reduce the leakage.
Penryn die-shot
When Conroe was launched it sported 291 million transistors, which is a big step up from Prescott (169 million), Cedar Mill (188 million, Presler 376 million) and Smithfield (230 million). Intel trumps this more than plenty with dual-core Penryn which will have 410 million transistors, 820 million (!) as quad-core. A lot of the new transistors most likely comes from the increased amount of cache though.
Thanks to the progress made, Intel will be able to launch Penryn-based processors with the same TDP as the previous generation of Core 2 Duo, but with higher frequencies. Previous rumors have spoken of speeds up to 4GHz. The four stationary systems had processors running at only 1.86GHz and 2.13GHz respectively, but this is expected to improve.
Intel expects that Penryn will be able to compete and and even outperform AMD’s coming processors, while at the same time Intel doesn’t expect the competition to be able to use high-k transistors until they take the step down to 32nm, which is quite far away for AMD as it just moved on to 65nm. Below we’ve gathered some articles that takes a look at the information Intel has released.
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