Intel's Penryn to boost systems speeds by up to 45 percent

Chip giant Intel has unveiled details of its upcoming Penryn chips and Nehalem chip architecture

Intel is promising a speed boost of up to 45 percent on systems equipped with its next processors, codenamed Penryn. The chip giant plans to have production of the parts on two facilities in the second half of this year and will not rule out the possibility of systems shipping in 2007.

On a conference call earlier today, Stephen Smith, Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group director, said that the company’s latest 45nm, high-k process technology will help it achieve 20 percent faster transistor switching plus 3GHz-plus clock speeds and more instructions per clock for Penryn. These capabilities will be achieved without affecting power consumption or thermal envelope, Intel said.

Penryn employs transistor gate insulators based on the element hafnium, a design described by Smith as “the biggest change since silicon gate MOS in the late 1960s”.

Penryn uses an enhanced version of the current Core microarchitecture, introducing SSE4, a new generation of Intel’s extensions that speed up media streaming and graphics-intensive applications. Other additions include what Intel calls the “Radix-16 Divider” to accelerate mathematical and geometric calculations used in 3D applications, faster virtualisation task switching and “deep power down” management to preserve battery life on mobile PCs.

Systems based on Penryn will also be boosted by a new front-side bus that runs at 1600MHz rather than the current 1333MHz, and 50 percent larger caches of 6MB for dual-core models and 12MB for quad-core models.

The improvements will feed into uniprocessor, dual-processor and multiprocessor Xeon dual-core and quad-core servers and workstations; a Core 2 dual-core and quad-core desktop, and a quad-core Core 2 Extreme Edition desktop; and a Core 2 dual-core mobile chip.

In terms of performance, Intel projects up to a 45 percent gain on workstation or high-performance computing “bandwidth-intensive applications”, up to 40 percent improved media application performance for tasks such as video encoding, and up to 20 percent faster gaming speeds.

Although Penryn chips will fit into current motherboard sockets, manufacturers will need to make Bios changes. Intel’s current schedule only commits to shipping chips this year although Smith did not dispute the possibility of system availability in 2007.

Intel also previewed its next microarchitecture, codenamed Nehalem and due to go into chip production in 2008. Nehalem is designed to fully exploit Intel’s new process technology with simultaneous multithreading support for up to 16 ore more threads and eight or more cores.

It will also give a debut to integrated graphics. Intel’s rival AMD last year acquired ATI to pursue graphics integration. However, Smith said some users would still want to take advantage of PCI Express add-in graphics cards.

“[Intel’s integrated graphics] won’t be the equivalent of high-end extreme graphics,” he said. “[For gaming] there is an expectation [that users] will have discrete cards.”

Smith said that memory support was “a level of detail we’re not sharing at this point” but added that buffered and unbuffered memory types will be supported for different usage needs.