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
[…] The DailyTech is reporting that Intel has set a launch date for Penryn, the next of the Core 2 line that currently includes Woodcrest and Conroe. Penryn is a process shrink, this time down to 45nm (we’ve talked about Penryn before; here and here) and those hi-k gates all the kids are talking about. Intel has set the launch date for its Penryn based quad-core Xeon processor family. The company intends to launch seven new Harpertown based models ranging from 2.0-to-3.16 GHz on November 11, according to a posting on Intel’s reseller webpage. Standard “E” bin and performance “X” bin processors launch on November 11. […]