Intel Vows to Boost Performance with New Core 2 “Penryn” Processors

by Anton Shilov
03/30/2007 | 04:28 PM

Intel Corp. this week said that its new-generation Core 2 processors that are made using 45nm fabrication process will run faster compared to current Core 2 chips at the same clock-speed thanks to boosted cache sizes as well as a number of new technologies implemented into the Core 2 micro-architecture.

According to Intel, the new Penryn processors will be able to run at higher clock-speeds compared to current desktop Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad offerings, though, the company does not indicate exact clock-speeds beyond saying that they would be higher than 3GHz. In addition, the new desktop dual-core chips will obtain 6MB unified L2 cache and ability to work with 1333MHz processor system bus, whereas Xeon processors will be able to use even 1600MHz processor system bus.

But while natural increases like clock-speeds or cache sizes will indisputably bring performance increases to the new processors, Intel also announced that the new chips will have greater instructions per clock (IPC) execution, which means that they will be faster and more efficient even at the same clock-speeds with the current generation chips.

The major micro-architectural improvements, besides SSE4 instruction set, include the so-called Unique Super Shuffle Engine and Radix 16 technique. The Super Shuffle Engine is a full-width, single-pass shuffle unit that is 128-bits wide, which can perform full-width shuffles in a single cycle. This significantly improves performance for SSE2, SSE3 and SSE4 instructions that have shuffle-like operations such as pack, unpack and wider packed shifts. This feature will increase performance for content creation, imaging, video and high-performance computing. Radix 16 technique, according to Intel, roughly doubles the divider speed over previous generations for computations used in nearly all applications. In addition, Intel also improved virtualization technology as well as added some features to dynamic acceleration technology, which is supposed to boost single-threaded applications’ performance on multi-core chips.

Each of Intel’s dual-core Penryn chips will have 410 million transistors, up significantly from 291 million of current dual-core Conroe processors, however, thanks to 45nm process technology, the chips will have die size of 107 square millimeters, down about 25% from 155 square millimeters of the Conroe.

Intel’s new 45nm microprocessors will require new platforms that support 1333MHz processor system bus. Currently Intel is working on a broad family of its 3-series chipsets that will also support PCI Express 2.0 and DDR3 memory.