Intel 45nm Fab Process Launched And Penryn Preview

NinjaKicks writes "Intel has decided to make public details of their new 45nm manufacturing process and also has broken news that next-gen Penryn core processors are running various versions of Windows and Vista successfully. Penryn will offer a host of core tweaks over Conroe, larger cache sizes, and SSE4 support. Also, although clock speeds will be increased, processors based on Penryn should fall within the same thermal power range as Conroe. Word is Penryn will also be compatible with some of the existing motherboards on the market while others will need either a BIOS update or perhaps other board-level changes."

Comments

More (Better?) Coverage

[Anonymous Coward]

http://dailytech.com/Life+With+Penryn/article5869. htm
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16839253/
http://money.cnn.com/2007/01/27/technology/bc.micr ochips.reut/index.htm?cnn=yes
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/27/technology/27chi p.html?em&ex=1170046800&en=59a4d10473c4a8c8&ei=508 7%0A
http://news.com.com/Chip+companies+entering+their+ metal+period/2100-1006_3-6153962.html
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=29 15

Re:Can we see some clock speed advances?

[shankarunni]

Can I see the clock speed boosted? Not everything can be parallelized and besides I don't think anyone at Microsoft knows how to. Another blurb in TFA talks about this:
HK + MG Combined:

• Drive current increased >20%, (>20% higher performance) OR
• source-drain leakage reduced >5x

What this means is that you can get higher performance (~20%) at the cost of higher power consumption (on the order of today's processors), OR you can get the same performance at substantially (not 1/5x, though) reduced power. The first few Penryn processors are apparently targeted at the Mobile market, so we can see where they are going with this in the short term.

Re:Is this a major breakthrough?

[brejc8]

Yes and No.
There are two improvements here which are happening at the same time. Process shrink (which happens all the time) and the use of High-K dielectric (which is something reather new in the mass manufacture feild anyway)

These 2 are just due to process shrink and nothing special:
  * ~2x improvement in transistor density, for either smaller chip size or increased transistor count
  * ~30% reduction in transistor switching power

This one is interesting and the OR should be regaded as an XOR.
  * >20%improvement in transistor switching speed or >5x reduction in source-drain leakage power
Basicly the individual transistors become tunable to decide if they should be fast or low power. Critical path ones will be fast and others will be low power.

And this one is a breakthrough:
  * >10x reduction in gate oxide leakage power
With static power now accounting for up to 50% of all power this is excelent.

Re:Who cares about clock speed, just overclock

[MoxFulder]

A production E4300 running at 1.8 GHz can be run at 3 GHz on stock air cooling.

Didn't you get the news? The clock speed race is sooooo 2005. For everything but the most CPU-bound number-crunching applications, increasing clock speed is no longer very desirable.

Today it's all about PERFORMANCE PER WATT (crucial for server farms and portables) and on-chip parallelism/SMP (useful for everything from desktop GUIs to web serving to RTOS embedded systems).

Re:Who cares about clock speed, just overclock

[julesh]

that "free speed" comes at the cost of a higher grade of memory (adding $100+)

To be fair, you probably get a greater performance improvement from increasing the FSB speed than you do from increasing the processor speed, so this may well be worth it.