Intel’s
new Penryn architecture snagged more than a few headlines this year,
but today finally marks the launch date for the world’s first 45nm
processor. The launch consists of 16 new processors for the server
and high-end desktop market. Penryn is the follow-up optical shrink to
Intel’s 65nm Conroe architecture. While the core architecture of Penryn
remains essentially the same as Conroe, Intel’s desktop variant of Core
2, the smaller transistors yield more features and cache. Penryn comes
with 6MB of L2 cache, whereas Conroe only had a maximum of 4MB.

New to Penryn is the SSE4 instruction set.  These new instructions will yield improved operation times for many CPU-intensive applications
like rendering and encoding. Fifteen of the new processors launched are
Xeons and targeted directly at the server market. Prices of the new
Xeons range from $177 all the way to $1,279. Although Intel is aiming
for immediate availabily, distributors tell DailyTech that certain
models will not reach retail availability for another 45 days.

Intel
today only launched one Penryn processor for desktops, the Intel Core 2
Extreme QX9650. The Core 2 Extreme is a high-end, quad-core desktop
processor. Intel guidance claims the retail price of the new processor
at $999.

Let’s
face it people, Core architecture has been a runaway success for the
big blue CPU giant, and it’s about time they got it right too. For
nearly two years prior to the Core 2 release for the desktop, Intel was under fire for its continuation of the Netburst based Pentium 4, Pentium D and Pentium Extreme Edition CPUs, especially the ones running on the 90nm process. Compared to the AMD
Athlon 64 of the time, the competing Netburst CPU ran slower in game
benchmarks and generated nearly two times the heat of the green
machine’s CPU using the same 90nm transistors.

  It’s now been a generation on and Intel has pushed the Core 2 series into quad core variants, something AMD is yet to achieve. While Phenom is on its way, Intel
still have the crown for the first quad core CPU to the market; and
while technically not a true quad core, it still has four processors
working on a single CPU package, just not on a single die.

While
AMD still plays catch up, Intel has kept its processor train at full
speed with yet another new processor in the Core 2 range. Using the
1333MHz FSB that the QX6850 brought to the party, the new series based
on the Penryn architecture as it’s now known reduces the production
size from 65nm to 45nm as well as adding in a few new features along
the way. Today we test out the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor
based on Penryn technology to see what or if anything has improved.