Intel Corporation officially unveiled today their first five 45 nanometer (nm) processors, codenamed “Penryn”, which are a part of the new Intel Centrino platform for laptops, codenamed “Santa Rosa Refresh”.
“All of these new chips include the company’s new transistor formula and 45nm manufacturing process that boost a PC’s speed, reduces power requirements, saves on battery life, helps the environment and comes in smaller packages for more fashionable and compact computer designs,” Intel’s press release says.
The first “Penryn” CPUs are the Intel Core 2 Duo T8100, T8300, T9300, T9500, and the Core 2 Extreme X9000.
The slowest and the most affordable of these “Penryn” CPUs are the Core 2 Duo T8100 at 2.1GHz and T8300 at 2.4GHz, both with 3MB of L2 cache. These processors are priced at $209 and $241, respectively.
The higher-end 2.5GHz T9300 for $316 and 2.6GHz T9500 for $530 feature 6MB of L2 cache.
Among the first 45nm mobile processors, the most powerful is the Core 2 Extreme X9000, with 2.8 GHz clock speed and 6MB of L2 cache. We assume the X9000 is overclockable, as same as older 65nm Core 2 Extreme notebook chips. The X9000’s price is $851.
The T8100, T8300, and T9300 have a power consumption of 35W, while the X9000 uses 44W, according to earlier reports. The five CPUs have dual processing cores and utilize a 800MHz front-side bus.
The chips will become available this month.
Intel claims “Santa Rosa Refresh” based notebooks deliver HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc support improvement with an optional third party decoder. The chip maker also added new video and graphics capabilities with the Intel HD Boost that includes Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions 4 (SSE4) technology for speeding up workloads including video encoding for high-definition and photo manipulation.
The multimedia experience is additionally enhanced with the Intel TV Wizard, enabling users to easily connect “Santa Rosa Refresh” notebooks to HDTVs.
As same as the last year’s “Santa Rosa” platform, the “Santa Rosa Refresh” uses the 965 Mobile chipset and features Next-Gen Wireless-N technology that supports draft 802.11n Wi-Fi standard.
According to official announcements and leaked information, “Penryn”-based notebooks from manufacturers such as HP, Sony, Lenovo (IdeaPad Y710, ThinkPads), and Toshiba are expected to hit the market soon.
This article was published on 12/05/2007 and updated with the official information on 07/01/2008.