Intel Penryn

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Intel's 45 nm Penryn CPU: 4 GHz Air Cooled

 

"The revision of the Conroe architecture - in order to boost its performance, incorporate new instructions, and, most importantly, reduce power consumption - is right on schedule. Until now, Intel's Core 2 processors always played second fiddle to AMD's Athlon 64 X2 processors when it came to power consumption, at least in idle operation. That was also the reason why we built our Solar-Powered PC around an AMD platform. However, this situation has changed with the Penryn core of Intel's Core 2 Extreme QX9650.

 

Simultaneously, Intel has also made radical changes to its production process, breaking with the conventional method. Instead of producing MOSFET transistors inside the CPU via the conventional silicon-oxide technique in use since 1960, Intel now fabricates the transistors using a new High-K Dielectric technique. As a result, the Penryn core has improved over the previous CPU generation in several ways."

 

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 - Penryn Ticks Ahead

 

"The larger cache is a bit different than what we've seen in Conroe. While Conroe's cache is a 4MB 16-way set-associative L2, the 6MB Penryn cache is 24-way set-associative, designed to improve hit rates and keep latency manageable in an already large cache. Intel hasn't revealed whether Penryn's prefetchers have been adjusted to help populate its larger cache any better. As we saw in our original Penryn preview, Penryn's cache performance remains unchanged; latencies in our final stepping are identical to Conroe.

 

The cache enhancements are by far the biggest consumer of those extra transistors in Penryn, but believe it or not, they aren't responsible for the biggest performance boost. Intel has been fairly steady in adding new instructions to the x86 ISA and Penryn continues the trend with the addition of SSE4. Penryn gets 47 new instructions that make up the first implementation of SSE4; more will come with Nehalem at the end of 2008. We'll talk about SSE4 performance later on in this article, but here are the instructions you get with Penryn:"