Intel has been working very hard to trounce the life out of the AMD Athlon architecture, and over the past 9 months it has done just that. With Intel’s 65nm processors pushing upward of a 30% performance increase over AMD, one has to wonder if AMD can make a comeback with its industry named K8L architecture. We know one thing: Intel is not going to make it easy.
Before the end of 2007, Intel is setup to push out its new 45nm Hi-k process technology. Hi-k stands for hafnium-based high-K + metal gate transistor design, which results in higher performance and more energy-efficient processors. With Intel’s steps forward with a 45nm shrink, not only will they be able to make even more power efficient CPUs, but cooler running ones, which will benefit the entire industry.
The new 45nm technology dubbed “Penryn” will come in dual and quad core designs, sporting a massive 820 million transistors per core. It will be contained in a package that is a quarter the size of a U.S. postage stamp, which is about 107mm2. Intel plans on having 15 different chips under the Penryn release and is sure that the 45nm release will close the gap AMD is advertising with its new Barcelona 65nm chip.
Intel’s Penryn is not just the average new processor to hit the market. Intel has been slaving away at many new improvements over the current Core 2 Duo architecture and is driving performance per watt into the sky.
Mobile technology will benefit greatly from Intel’s new Penryn because Intel has built in what they are calling Deep Power Down, which will significantly reduce the power of the processor during idle periods. This helps extend battery life in laptops. Along with the Deep Power Down, Intel has increased L2 cache sizes allowing dual cores to come equipped with 6MB L2 cache and quad cores to come with 12MB L2 cache. Cache is a memory reservoir where frequently accessed data can be stored for more rapid access. It also looks like the Penryn will kick off the GHz race once again as chips will be shipped with 3GHz stock clock speeds.
Overall, Intel is poised high on their horse and AMD hasn’t done much to dismount them. With Intel’s push to further technology to 45nm (and even 32nm) processes we can assume we will have a generation of faster and more efficient CPUs very soon.
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