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Months of anticipation and speculation are about to end, as Intel prepares the launch of the first 45nm Core 2 CPUs known as "Penryn".  This is the new kid on the block – and while you can’t buy one yet, we are here to tell you about Penryn, and how it performs.  We spent several weeks with a Core 2 Extreme QX9650 quad core Yorkfield processor and we're pretty excited to finally report it all to you. 

The QX9650 Penryn is built on Intel’s 45nm High-k metal gate silicon technology which features transistors with reduced current leakage, thus reducing power consumption and allowing for increased clock speeds. More than just a die shrink, Penryn also has a number of interesting enhancements to the extremely successful Core 2 micro architecture:

• faster Radix-16 divider
• faster OS primitive support
• enhanced virtualization technology speeding up entry/exit by 25%-75%
• up to 12MB 24 way set associative L2 cache
• split load cache enhancements
• improved store forwarding
• higher bus speeds
• 50 new SSE4 instructions
• Super shuffle engine improves pack/unpack and packet shift instructions
• Deep power down technology
• Enhanced dynamic acceleration technology

Our particular chip, the QX9650, is the second fastest Yorkfield being released in November, with its four cores running at 3.0GHz (1333Mhz FSB at 9X multiplier).  The CPU-Z and BIOS shots below give you the details.

Penryn quad core processors are constructed as a multi-chip module consisting of two dual core 400+ million transistor Penryn dies with up to 6MB of L2 cache and come in a Socket 775 ball grid array package.

The 45nm architecture allows for roughly twice the transistor density in the same die area, with approximately 30% reduction in transistor switching power and better than 20% greater switching speed due to a five fold reduction in source drain leakage power and a greater than ten times reduction in transistor gate oxide leakage.