Posted on Wednesday, March 28 2007 @ 19:54 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
The chip giant says it has more than 15 45nm Hi-k products in development and will have two fabs capable of manufacturing 45nm processors by the end of this year, with another two planned to switch to 45nm by the second half of next year. More info and slides at HardOCP.
The first 45nm processors will be Penryn and in 2008 we can expect the Nehalem which will feature a new microarchitecture. For the 2009-2010 timeframe Intel is preparing 32nm processors. The 32nm Westmere will be a shrink/derivative of the Nehalem and after that we can expect the 32nm Gesher which will introduce another new architecture.
New Penryn technologies:
According to the slides Intel is planning 45nm dual-core processors for the mobile platform and dual-core and quad-core processors for the desktop platform. The mobile chips will feature up to 6MB L2 cache, deep power down technology and the enhanced dynamic acceleration technology. The Deep Power Down technology should significantly reduce processor power usage in idle mode and further improve the battery life. In this new power management state the system turns off the core clock, PPL, L1 cache and L2 cache. The Enhanced Dynamic Acceleration Technology is designed to use the power headroom of the idle core to boost the performance of the non-idle core.Fast Radix-16 divider, should double the divide execution speed Enhanced Intel Virtualization Technology Larger cache memory: up to 6MB, 12MB Split load cache enhancement Higher bus speeds Intel SSE4 instructions Super Shuffle Engine - enables 2x faster SSE shuffle instruction execution Deep Power Down Technology Enhanced Intal Dynamic Acceleration Technology
The new 45nm desktop Core 2 will get clockspeeds above 3GHz. The dual-core parts will get up to 6MB L2 cache and a 65W TDP while the quad-cores will get 12MB L2 cache memory and TDPs of 95W and 130W.
