Intel Demos 45nm Penryn Processors, Due by end of 2007
NY Times reports on an advance from Intel which is said to represent "the most significant change in the materials used to manufacture silicon chips since Intel pioneered the modern integrated-circuit transistor more than four decades ago."
Intel is moving towards the 45nm manufacturing process and demoed (CNet) 45-nm Penryn chips during a press briefing. The Penryn chips are said to be available "before the end of the year."
Penryn is essentially a shrink of the Core 2 Duo chips, with a few extras like the SSE4 instructions. It's being introduced along with the new manufacturing technology, the "tick" of Intel's plans. Then next year, when the 45-nanometer manufacturing technology is mature, Intel will introduce a new chip microarchitecture code-named Nehalem--the "tock"--with more significant changes to the chip design.
The advances in the manufacturing process include the use of new insulators and new metallic alloy materials in transistor components. Current Intel chips utilize a 65-nm manufacturing process. As always, the move to the smaller processes tends to improve performance and decrease power consumption.
According to this article, the Penryn family of chips will deliver new laptop dual-core microprocessors, a desktop dual-core and a quad-core, and server dual and quad-core processors.
Apple will, of course, benefit from these new processors when they are released, and Intel has stated that the current prototypes are already booting Mac OS X -- indicating that Apple is already involved in early testing.
More technical details: TGDaily and AnandTech
Popular Stories
Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of "Let Loose" and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event. Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more ...
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
Apple has dropped the number of Vision Pro units that it plans to ship in 2024, going from an expected 700 to 800k units to just 400k to 450k units, according to Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo. Orders have been scaled back before the Vision Pro has launched in markets outside of the United States, which Kuo says is a sign that demand in the U.S. has "fallen sharply beyond expectations." As a...
Apple is finally planning a Calculator app for the iPad, over 14 years after launching the device, according to a source familiar with the matter. iPadOS 18 will include a built-in Calculator app for all iPad models that are compatible with the software update, which is expected to be unveiled during the opening keynote of Apple's annual developers conference WWDC on June 10. AppleInsider...
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
