Penryn

Ars Technica has an article that covers some interesting technical details on Intel’s forthcoming Penryn chip. If you’re a chip person, you’ll likely read the whole thing. If you’re not, here are some of the high points:

• New radix-16 divider makes division up to 2x faster than a Core 2 Duo (sqrt if 4x)
• 50 new vector instructions (like one for the dot product)
• A new 128-bit shuffle engine to pack/unpack/align vectors in one clock
• 1.6 GHz on the FSB
• 6/12 MB of L2 on dual/quad core chips