Intel announces Penryn for November 12th, shows off Nehalem and 32nm SRAM

It's Fall IDF time in San Francisco, and Intel really came out swinging in the chips department. The company is releasing 15 of its new 45nm Penryn this year, with the first chips hitting on November 12th, and another 20 hitting in Q1 2008. That could get some of those chips into desktops before AMD's 65nm Phenom hits, and is earlier than was expected from the chip giant. The Penryn chips are promised to bring a 20 percent performance increase while improving energy efficiency. Intel also took the opportunity to show off Nehalem, Penryn's followup. Nehalem sports a new micro-architecture to further reduce power drain, and it can adjust itself dynamically to best suit the task at hand while saving power in the process. And just to tease, Intel talked up its 32nm SRAM tech, the world's first 32nm chip, which will apparently be ready in 2009, but we'll settle for faster chips and longer battery life from the likes of Intel and AMD in the interim.

[Via TG Daily]

[sselemit @ Sep 18th 2007 2:46PM]

At a certain point, they gotta stop reducing its size.
How could they cram up so many things in a frigin' 32nm chip?

[andrews @ Sep 18th 2007 3:01PM]

Dude, the 32nm means that is the smallest size that they can work with (e.g. the substrate size). That isn't the size of the actual chip! Just for a reference, atoms have a diameter of about 0.1nm, so that means that they are making the chips with 320 atom wide building blocks. Which is how they are cramming so much stuff in.

[Jim Halpert @ Sep 18th 2007 3:00PM]

oh dang apple's got to catch up now..so much for buying a laptop in Oct...

[DingDong @ Sep 18th 2007 3:12PM]

Considering that Apple is the slowest adopter of any new chips, I assume you are talking about October 2008.

[thassell @ Sep 18th 2007 3:36PM]

Actually when Intel recently introduced its most recent mobile platform, Santa Rosa, Apple was pretty much the first to implement the latest and greatest from Intel....

[Adam @ Sep 18th 2007 4:14PM]

If Apple comes out with a Penryn-equipped Macbook Pro 17" with LED backlight, I'd be the first in line. Probably have to wait until January or February at the earliest though. :(

[coach @ Sep 18th 2007 3:07PM]

I'm afraid AMD will get even further behind now. Nice to see Intel's up to speed though with small and energy efficient chips.

[Ian @ Sep 18th 2007 3:37PM]

Super efficient Intel execution on their business strategy. When Intel realised, a few year ago, they had been blind sided by AMD they cancelled future rollouts and redesigned their entire range and strategy. Looked not too good as they gave leadership to AMD for 18 months, but these days they have regained leadership and how. And guess what, all this is good for the consumer.

[System48 @ Sep 18th 2007 3:54PM]

Everything's good as long as Intel doesn't decide to run over AMD.

[Ian @ Sep 18th 2007 6:13PM]

System4,

About 18 months or so ago the CEO of AMD went public that his company was going to compete with Intel on price and that Intel would not be able to respond.
Well if you make such a statement against Intel, which whatever one thinks of them is probably one of the best/most efficient ever operators of fabs, then you have to accept the consequences.

i.e. why shouldn't Intel offer CPUs on price discounts for size and if that means that the OEM sees it's best to go only Intel only then that's fair. Especially when AMD said they were going to beat Intel in pricing period.

Me? I hope AMD servives and finds their niche. I suspect Intel wants this also or they would be offering their new products on an even faster pace.

[sean @ Sep 18th 2007 3:46PM]

Who is Intel paying to come up with the names of their chips? And how can I get in on that?

[Fenway Beer Man @ Sep 18th 2007 3:59PM]

They are named after places

[PJS @ Feb 24th 2008 3:02AM]

Nehalem is the name of a river in NW Oregon and the indian tribe that lived there. All their names are locations in the Northwest.

[Edge @ Sep 18th 2007 3:57PM]

Anyone else notice that after AMD dropped the Athlon 64 bomb, Intel has been continually coming out with arguably the best products (CPUs & motherboards) they've ever created?

Thank you AMD. May you stick around forever just so Intel doesn't ever get lazy again.

[Corndog @ Sep 18th 2007 4:21PM]

Edge, you are dead on. Nobody benefits more than us consumers by their war!
And man, upgrade to 3G...

[Sean Jackson @ Sep 18th 2007 4:59PM]

Ok, the 3G joke got me.

If the new hotness is due out around November, should I hold off on getting a lenovo tablet pc or are these just for desktops? Faster+less power should be much more noticeable in a laptop than a desktop (generally) and I could wait a few months. Thoughts?

[MikeG @ Sep 18th 2007 5:37PM]

How long before we see the 45nm chips in Laptops (windows based).
I've been holding off getting one atm, in wait for one of the more energy efficent, and more powerfull CPU.

[jroc @ Sep 18th 2007 9:02PM]

According to intel after Dec. 31st you won't even be able to buy a 65nm laptop chip you will have to go penryn. Dooo it, come to the dark side.

[Fredster @ Sep 19th 2007 9:40AM]

No mention about more cores??:(

[Eric Tousignant @ Sep 19th 2007 12:15PM]

Would you need any more cores anyway ? At some point... the better go on the energy efficiency than on power... It doesn't serves anyone nowaday... Processors are always getting better but the other parts in computer world are stagnating. We need to improve more things than just the processor. Talking about their Motherboard... If you take a look at their selection. Intel doesn't have any mobo available for their newest processors !!! And why do they still offer a mobo for crossfire (ATI = AMD) instead of SLI (nVidia) ?

[Raptor007 @ Sep 19th 2007 1:46PM]

The pic for the article reminded me of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmaYH1F6kho

[degac @ Sep 19th 2007 2:56PM]

Hi to all!
Intel is copying AMD platform: Hypertransport ->QuickPath, Memory Controller on Chip (like AMD since first Opteron, April 2003 ->4 years later), real quad core (I don't understand).
The real advantages for Intel are the fabs and productions volume.
2008 starts to become very interesting...

Byez!