MacRumors.com

TheRegister.co.uk reports that the first Intel Penryn chips will be formally launched on November 11th. The report apparently comes from Intel's own website for dealers.

The first of the Penryn processors will be Xeon CPUs and come in 2.00GHz, 2.33GHz, 2.50GHz, 2.66GHz, 2.83GHz, 3.00GHz and 3.16GHz speeds with 1333MHz frontside buses. The 45nm chips are expected to be Quad-Core chips with 12MB of L2 cache.

Apple currently uses Xeon (server-class) processors in their Mac Pro computers. According to our Buyer's Guide the Mac Pro was last updated to an 8-Core configuration in April of this year. However, the base Quad-core configurations have not been updated since their first release in August 2006.

The current Mac Pros offer Quad-Core configurations of 2.0GHz, 2.66GHz, and 3.0GHz (65nm, 4MB L2 Cache per Processor) and a 8-Core configuration at 3.0GHz (65nm, 8MB L2 Cache per Processor).