Intel's Penryn & Nehalem - will Nehalem be the 'Death of the General Purpose CPU'? Review - PAGE 1

Pat Gelsinger, general manager of the Digital Enterprise Group hosted a press briefing this morning  (8am PST) about Intel's upcoming plans. Most of the information in the briefing has already been leaked onto the net in one form or another, but it was nice to get official confirmation, and there were a couple of new tidbits as well.

The briefing covered the Penryn 45nm die shrink of the Core 2 architecture that is going to be launched this year, and also gave some tantalizing information of the Nehalem architecture set to debut in 2008.  I've decided to summarize and expand on some of the information in this article to give everyone a bigger picture.

Penryn

While the details revealed about Nehalem are fascinating, let's first take a look at Penryn - after all, we will soon be able to get Penryn parts, whereas we will have to wait until 2008 for Nehalem.

Penryn packs a whopping 820 million transistors into a 107mm2 die - and due to using the more efficient 45nm design, even with all those transistors, the die ends up being 25% smaller than the current 65nm Core 2 die's.

Penryn Design Goals

• Increase the performance per clock cycle
• Increase processor core frequency
• Improve energy efficiency
• Deliver lead product for 45nm High k + metal gate process technology
• Deliver optimized processors for different market segments and power envelopes

The new "45nm High-k Process Technology" provides the ability to pack twice twice as many transistors into the same die area, and also provides a 20% higher transistor switching speed, along with lower leakage current tending to reduce the amount of heat generated, thus partially offsetting the additional heat generated by running at higher frequencies.

Based purely on the specified 20% higher transistor switching speed we can expect to see processor speeds in excess of 3.2GHz at the high end for Penryn; given the 1333MHz FSB my guess will be that Penryn will soon be available at up to 3.33GHz.