Intel samples 45 nanometre parts

ACCORDING TO Reuters, Intel has taped out Penryn and is starting to sample it. These 45 nanometre chips are going to be a shrink of Merom/Conroe/ Woodcrest with some goodies sprinkled on top. We first told you about them a year and a half ago, and not much looks to have changed.

The basics are the same as the current core, it is just tweaked. The big thing is that cache will be upped to 6MB from 4, basically they will be catching up to AMD here (Note: I am going to get phone calls over that one...). The other biggie will be the clocks, no not the top end, the dividers. Look for it to be in the 3.46-3.73GHz range when all is said and done, but they will support half-clock dividers. This means instead of the rather absurd 333MHz steps they have now, they can do 166MHz.

If you are curious why the current CoreNumberForeignnumber parts go from 1.6 to 3.0GHz, that is because marketing demands 5 SKUs, and without the half step dividers you are looking at 5 * 333 or 5 * 266 for the spread. That will be a thing of the past.

The chips are also on the 45nm process, and from all reports, it is going swimingly. Intel is going to drive the mainstream wattage down a bit from 65 to 50W here but we still have a year to go, things may change in the meantime. Where ever it ends up, it will be less power than the 65nm parts.

Last up are some new *Ts, most notably Rockton finally pokes it's head above the surface for a look around. The chips will also be a little better, a little more efficient, and fix a few of the warts that CoreDuho had. HT was also back on some roadmaps, but it does not look like that will ever be turned on, but the circuitry seems to be there in one way or another.

There are a few things that you won't see this time around, real quad cores and higher FSBs. The Yorktown rumours that were flying around at IDF were and are wrong, there is no converged quad core parts until Nehalem. There are also no plans for a 1600FSB unless something bad happens to Nehalem/CSI, or AMD pressures Intel hard.

While the chip may be ready a little earlier, don't expect the process to be pulled in much. Think Q4/07 for a trickle of parts, and Q1/08 for the real volume. Intel pulled in a lot of dates during 2006, but pulling in a combination of process and parts may be a little much to hope for. µ