Intel to ship faster Penryn chips in 2007

Ahead of new mobile Core 2 Duos expected in May, Intel on Wednesday announced that it will begin producing its next-generation Penryn family of processors in the second half of this year and outlined its new Nehalem chip architecture expected in 2008. The six new "Penryn" processors, including both dual- and quad-core variations, will benefit from enhancements to the Intel Core microarchitecture and also Intel's new 45nm Hi-k process technology, which the company claims results in higher performance and more energy-efficient processors.

Penryn's new microarchitecture enhancements will bring extended battery life for mobile devices, enhanced performance for single-threaded applications, new SIMD extensions for better performance, enhanced virtualization, more instruction executions per clock cycle, larger on-chip caches, and higher processor speeds of more than 3GHz, the Santa Clara-company claimed.