Intel’s Quad-Core Penryn For Notebooks Coming in 2008

Along with Intel’s next generation dual-core “Penryn” laptop processors produced using 45nm technology, the quad-core 45nm “Penryns” for notebooks will hit the market during 2008, the General Manager of Mobile Platforms Group at Intel Shmuel (Mooly) Eden said yesterday at Intel Developers Forum (IDF) in Beijing.

The quad-core mobile “Penryns” will be designed for use in gaming laptops and in mobile workstations, “where users are willing to trade battery life for more performance”. But, this CPU with four processing cores is unlikely to find its way into most notebooks for some time, IT World reports.

“You’ll see it at the high-end, but I don’t see it running so fast into the mainstream because I don’t believe there will be enough threaded applications that will justify the tradeoffs,” Eden said.

PC Retail Magazine published today an article saying notebook quad core chips aren’t predicted to be part of mainstream until 2010, though they may emerge in higher price points by late 2009.

Regarding performance of “Penryn” processors for desktop PCs, the benchmark results published at IDF indicate these chips will have more than 40 percent better gaming performance than their currently available Core 2 “Conroe” counterparts. The increases of about 15 percent for imaging-related applications and 25 percent for 3-D rendering, as well as more than 40 percent faster video encoding with Intel SSE4 optimized video encoders, are also expected in desktop computers. However, the design of the quad-core laptop-use chip “will be determined by the realities of notebook PC designs”.

“You can imagine that because we are speaking about notebooks that we have special constraints from cooling, from space,” Eden said.