Intel's Penryn chip coming Nov. 12

As first 45nm chip launches, Intel already plans to shrink to 32nm

Intel is going to release its coming Penryn chip Nov. 12, the first time the chipmaker has set a specific date for launch of the new 45nm design processor.

Paul Otellini , Intel’s president and CEO, announced the launch date in a keynote address Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

The Penryn chip, available in dual-core and quad-core designs, will be environmentally-friendly as well as energy-efficient and powerful, Otellini said. It will be 100% lead free and the packaging that goes around the chip will be 60% smaller than on previous chipsets, allowing for its use in smaller devices. It will use a combination tin-silver-copper solder instead of lead to connect the silicon die to the chips, and will use copper in other parts of the chipset.

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Intel is going to release its coming Penryn chip Nov. 12, the first time the chipmaker has set a specific date for launch of the new 45nm design processor.

Paul Otellini , Intel’s president and CEO, announced the launch date in a keynote address Tuesday at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

The Penryn chip, available in dual-core and quad-core designs, will be environmentally-friendly as well as energy-efficient and powerful, Otellini said. It will be 100% lead free and the packaging that goes around the chip will be 60% smaller than on previous chipsets, allowing for its use in smaller devices. It will use a combination tin-silver-copper solder instead of lead to connect the silicon die to the chips, and will use copper in other parts of the chipset.

Penryn is the first high-volume processor made with new 45nm (nanometer) technology, shrinking the size of the die from the present 65nm size. Shrinking the size of the die makes it possible to add more features to the chipset such as a larger memory cache and a faster network connection. Intel will introduce 15 new 45nm processors by the end of this year for servers and desktops and another 20 in 2008 for mobile devices, including the Silverthorne processor for ultra-mobile devices.

“We’re very excited about our customers’ adoption of this technology,” Otellini said, in a presentation at the Moscone Center.
Penryn will be followed by Nehalem in the second half of 2008. He showed his audience a silicon wafer, a large shiny gold disk about the size of a vinyl record album, and said that each Nehalem die cut from this wafer has 731 million transistors on it.

Nehalem will have more power flexibility for the purpose of energy efficiency, Otellini said. “Turning cores on and off, turning threads on and off and enabling and disabling power states [allows you] to be able to optimize the performance for the task at hand.” Intel is already on track to move to 32nm technology in 2009.

While long the chip industry leader, Intel has faced recent competition from Advanced Micro Devices, which beat it to market with the first dual-core processor. But Intel bounced back with its own dual-core processor and also beat AMD to market with the first next generation four-core processor. Intel is moving off of the 65nm design to 45nm just as AMD is moving to 65nm from 90nm. AMD won’t have 45nm products until later next year.

“Customers don’t buy nanometers,” said Bruce Shaw, director of server and workstation product marketing, AMD, when discussing its quad-core Barcelona processor, which debuted Sept. 10, five days after Intel’s quad-core Xeon 7300 launch. “Nanometers are important in the design and how you package a processor … but not necessarily in terms of what a customer is going to see in terms of power consumption or performance.”

AMD also responded to Otellini’s product announcements, calling some of those designs “close facsimiles of technologies AMD pioneered.”And, of Intel’s pending Larrabee gaming processor that combines graphics and CPU processing, AMD says it’s been there and done that.