Life Starts At 45nm With Intel's Penryn Chips

The first two offerings of Penryn-family products include 16 new server and high-end PC processors, priced at between $177 and $1,279 in quantities of 1,000. Included in the mix released Monday are 12 quad-core Xeon 5400 processors with clock speeds ranging from 2.0GHz to 3.20GHz, FSB speeds up to 1600MHz and a 12MB cache. AMD's first quad-core Opterons, released in early September, hit the ceiling at 2.0GHz -- Intel's floor for its new 45nm quad-core Xeons.

The Xeon 5400s, codenamed Harpertown, come in at the same price points and slot to the same sockets as the equivalent "Clovertown" line of 65nm quad-core Xeon server chips, said Intel Enterprise Marketing Director Shannon Poulin.

"We're aggressively ramping up the CPUs. And not only with the HPs, the IBMs and the Dells, but also with the Lenovos and everybody up and down the supply chain. The beauty of it is that the new processors are socket-compatible," Poulin said.

True, the 45nm Xeons are compatible with Intel's 5000 chipset family, but Source Code's Corn still prefers AMD's "investment protection" approach, where each new generation of Opteron processor is designed with the same socket-compatibility as the very first edition.

"Some of the boards we've been selling over the past several months will support 45nm, but not all. AMD did a better job on socket match-up for the life of the motherboard," Corn said.

Three 45nm dual-core chips that will be released Dec. 7 round out the server mix for 2007. The Xeon 5200s have clock speeds of up to 3.40GHz, FSB peaking at 1600MHz and cache sizes of 6MB. A single desktop processor is also included in the initial 45nm rollout, the Core 2 Extreme QX9650 quad-core processor. Specs were not immediately available for the high-performance desktop chip, which is priced at $999-per-unit in 1,000-unit trays and available Monday.

Meanwhile, Intel is also launching three new platforms that support 45nm chips. These include the 5400 or "Stoakley" chipset for high-performance computing (HPC), the 5100 Memory Controller Hub chipset and ICH-9R I/O controller built for reduced power consumption using native DDR2 memory, and the 3200 or "Garlow" chipset for single-processor entry servers.

The chipmaker on Monday will also begin shipping a new 45nm-compatible motherboard to channel partners building high-performance desktop systems. Desktop Board DX38BT for the Intel Extreme Series will sell for under $250 at retail, said Intel North America Channel Marketing Manager Todd Garrigues.

Asked when system builders could expect vPro and Centrino Pro platforms built for 45nm desktop processors, Poulin said while they might possibly be ready in early 2008, "I can't say if they're lined up yet."

As for benchmarks, Intel is claiming several "world records" for its new processors and chipsets in areas such as TPC-C*, SPECint*_rate2006, VMmark and SPECfp*_rate2006. Additional architectural features of the new chips include "47 new instructions that speed up workloads including video encoding for high-definition and photo manipulation, as well as key HPC and enterprise applications."

Intel will unveil more 45nm processors next year. Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad desktop processors are coming in the first quarter of 2008, as are Core 2 Extreme and Core 2 Duo chips for laptop computers.