Intel's Penryn Chip Performance Boosts

Intel announced some performance details on the upcoming Penryn processors at the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing.

Penryn is the next chip family based on the Core micro-architecture and will include a number of enhancements along with a die-shrink to 45nm. The upcoming Penryn chips will be marketed under both the "Core" and "Xeon" brand names and encompass the entire spectrum of products (mobile, desktop, server).

According to Intel executives, Penryn-based computers will see the following speed improvements over the current Core 2 Extreme processors

- 15% for imaging-related
- 25% for 3-D rendering
- 40% for gaming
- 40% for video encoding (SSE4 optimized)

The comparison was made between 3.33GHz pre-production Penryn processor vs 2.93GHz Core 2 Extreme processor-based desktop-class machines.

For workstations and "high-performance computing", Penryn is said to provide improvements of:

- 45% for "bandwidth intensive applications
- 25% for servers using Java

These comparisons were made between pre-production Xeon (Penryn) processor vs Xeon 5355 processor-based workstations.

Penryn chips are expected to be released later in 2007.