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On a conference call, Stephen Smith, Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group director, said that the company’s latest 45nm High-k process technology will help it achieve 20 percent faster transistor switching, clock speeds north of 3GHz and more instructions per clock for Penryn. As per Intel’s recent mantra, all of this will be delivered without breaking the current ceiling on power and thermals.

Penryn uses an enhanced version of the current Core microarchitecture, introducing SSE4, a new generation of Intel’s extensions that used to generate a joke about Screaming Cindy. Other additions include what Intel calls the “Radix-16 Divider” to accelerate mathematical and geometric calculations, faster virtualisation task switching and “deep power down” power management.

At the system level, Penryn will also be boosted by a new front-side bus that runs at 1600MHz rather than the current 1333MHz, and bigger caches -- 6MB for dual-cores and 12MB for quad-cores.

The improvements will feed into uniprocessor, dual-processor and multiprocessor Xeon dual-core and quad-core servers and workstations; a Core 2 dual-core and quad-core desktop, and a quad-core Core 2 Extreme Edition desktop; and a Core 2 dual-core mobile chip.

In terms of performance, Intel projects up to a 45 percent gain on workstation or high-performance computing “bandwidth-intensive applications”, up to 40 percent improved media application performance for tasks such as video encoding, and up to 20 percent faster gaming speeds.