Intel's Coming Out Party for 45nm Penryn

Intel's top brass, including CEO Paul Ottelini, came to San Francisco's swanky Ritz Carlton hotel last evening to share the chip giant's leap to 45-nanometer with its energy-efficient Penryn.

Intel calls the significant shrinkage -- and shift from silicon dioxide to hafnium to get there -- a "breakthrough"; the biggest in 40 years.

In reality, Penryn is more evolutionary, says the general manager of high-performance gaming PC maker Falcon, Bradd Berdelman, who demonstrated the yet-unreleased photo-realistic PC game Crysis for the crowd on his company's first Penryn machine, a water-cooled 3.0 Ghz model.

Penryn replaces the current Core 2 Duo architecture chips, which are 65nm. 32nm chips will follow in two years' time roughly, in the third quarter of 2009. The bigger bump up will be felt more clearly by the end of next year, when Intel releases the full realization on 45nm with its Nehalem chips.

Regardless, in the here and now, Penryn is more energy efficient and fast. Desktop and server virtualization gets a boost, and new SSE4 instructions promise media muscle.

From our early outline of Penryn:

Moving to 45nm allows Intel to keep pushing clock speed while keeping power consumption constant. Desktop Penryn chips will launch at over 3GHz running on a 1333 MHz bus. The server models will step up to a super-fast 1600 MHz bus. Cache gets a boost as well, from 4MB to 6MB for dual core desktop chips and from 8MB to 12MB for quad core. Penryn chips will also include SSE4 instructions to speed up streaming data and multimedia performance.

Berdelman said Falcon and other overclockers could take advantage of the cooler running chips to squeeze out even more Ghz (gigahertz) than now. The first round is 4.0Ghz without a problem, he said.

Other than for high-performance gaming, the chips -- available for servers and desktops now (See PC World's first look); notebooks in 2008 -- are seen as being green.

Intel Executive Vice President Shawn Maloney said it was no "greenwashing" effort in saying that Penryn was a cleaner and greener technolgy. Penryn chips are more energy efficient, with servers drawing as little as 75 watts.

Efficiency is in, with data centers looking to save on energy costs with oil at $100 a barrel, Intel execs said. In addition, the chips are made in a more "eco-friendly" way, with the chips now free of lead and no longer using halogen. Its 65nm chips were 95 percent lead-free.

As a laptop dude, Penryn's efficiency cred looks good to me. Intel says the shrinkage to 45nm will get energy requirements for laptops down to 25 watts. And when idle, Deep Power Down Technology will make Penryn laptops more energy-efficient. Battery run time is one of the key features for me, and I don't like having to use a protruding battery or give up my optical drive. I'm looking forward to next year's Penryn notebooks.

Penryn chips actually launched on Sunday night, so last evening's event was more the coming out party.

Here are some shots (excuse my Moto Q's lousy camera) from the eve:

Intel's 45nm "Penryn" wafer.