At a press conference today, Intel's Pat Gelsinger revealed fresh details of the company's forthcoming 45nm processor family, codenamed Penryn. Penryn is the 45nm successor to the Merom/Conroe/Woodcrest microarchitecture that underlies the popular 65nm Core 2 Duo processor line.
Gelsinger opened the briefing with a discussion of the success of the company's "tick-tock" model of processor innovation, a model in which process shrinks and major architectural revisions are rolled out on a
staggered two-year time scale. "Today's disclosures clearly lay out that this engine is delivering and delivering on track," said Gelsinger, responding to what he characterized as initial skepticism that the model could work.
Gelsinger then moved on to discuss Penryn, which is the first product that will be produced on Intel's new
high-k dielectric 45nm process. Penryn is more than just a shrink—it's a derivative of Core 2 Duo (codenamed Merom) with a number of improvements. Gelsinger laid out those improvements in more detail than we've seen so far, so I'll outline them below.
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Intel spills beans on Core 2 successor: SSE4, faster virtualization, bigger caches
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