THERE'S A NEW high-end desk¬top chip in town-namely, Intel's Penryn family of CPUs, which are the first built on a 45nm manufacturing process developed by the chip giant. Our first World Bench 6 tests with the new chip showed only a minor performance gain for the 45nm, 3-G Hz QX9650 Core 2 Extreme versus the 65nm, 3-Ghz QX6850 Core 2 Extreme chip that it is supplanting. However, none of the applications in our test suite utilize the QX9650's new SSE4 instruc¬tions, which can greatly speed up tasks such as some key operations in video encoding in apps that use SSE4. FOR NOW, THE real news is that the 45nm manufacturing process Intel uses for Penryn should allow the company to keep churning out superfast desktop chips for the forseeable future.

IfIntel were to have its own TV show, it would probably be entitled Honey, I Shrunk the Chips. The Penryn family of CPUs, that launched on November 12, are built on a manufacturing process that shrinks the features of the chip down to a mere 45 nanometers (or about 1/18000 the width of a human hair). That's down from the 65nm process the company has used for its current Core line and the 90nm process it used on some Pentium 4s. The company has already demonstrated a 32nm process that it intends to begin using to produce chips in two years.

THE QX96so, THE first desktop Penryn chip, is a quad¬core CPU that is aimed squarely at enthusiasts and other early adopters. (Among other things, it has no locks to pre¬vent users from overclocking it.) For the most part, only select games and high-end audio or video applications can take advantage of more than two cores, so the strategy makes sense on several levels. Mainstream users will have to wait until next year for more affordable 45nm dual-core offerings. Intel did not announce the exact pricing for the chip, but if the $1000-plus prices (approx Rs. 40,000) of the current top-of.the-line Core 2 Extreme QX6850 and QX6800 are any indication, the new CPU will not be cheap.
Like the existing quad-core crop of Core 2 Extremes, the new product is actually two dual-core CPUs paired on a single silicon package with a shared bus interface, running at 1333 MHz in this case. Each of the two dual-core CPUs carries a shared 6MB of secondary (L2) cache, up from the 4MB of each core of the previous QX6850 chip, for a total of 12MB. This larger secondary cache is partly responsible for the new chip's high transistor count.

Faster divide operations and the larger L2 cache, Intel's own benchmark results from this spring's Developer Forum showed modest performance gains for Penryn over the last 65nm generation of chips running at the same clock speed, as well as moderate power savings.
To see just how much you stand to gain with a Penryn CPU running current hardware and software, we put together a test system built with Asus's Maximus Formula X38-based motherboard, 2GB ofDDR2-800 memory, a pair of Seagate ST3320620AS 320G B hard drives in a striped array, and an EVGA GeForce 8800GTS graphics card. We tested both the QX9650 and the older QX6850, using PC World's application-based WoridBench 6 Beta 2. The QX9650 bested its older sibling by a mere point, 127 to 126. In the majority of our test apps, the new chip was 2 to 5 percent faster, but slower times in Nero and especially WinZip dropped the overall number. Neither World Bench score would crack the top five in our power charts, though the G PU and hard-drive setup we used weren't cutting-edge, just close to it. As mentioned earlier, none of the applications in the WorldBench 6 Beta 2 suite are optimized to take advantage of the new SSE4 (Streaming SIMD [Single Instruction, Multiple Data] Extensions 4) instruction set, and only a few World Bench apps can take advantage of more than two cores.

For example, Gigabyte's Tomas Lee confirms that the company's P35, G33, and P31 motherboards will run the new CPUs after a simple BIOS update. And nViclia tells us that its nForce 600i series of motherboards, as well as the recently launched x 7150 and 7100 Series chip sets, will also work with Penryn CPUs.

Intel is pushing DDR3 as a preferred memory companion for its 45nm CPUs, and has incorporated support for it (as well as DDR2) into its more recent chip sets. But given the high cost and small performance benefits of DDR3, many motherboard manufacturers are still designing their X38 motherboards around DDR2. Even the high-end Asus Maximus board we used for testing-equipped with a built-in water-block assembly so you can water-cool its chip set-uses DDR2. Despite its tardiness, the company's Athlon CPUs have sold well because they outperformed Intel's products for a good three years starting in 2003. Athlon's dominance in speed tests ended abruptly in the summer of 2006 when Intel introduced its Core 2 line, though AMD's CPUs still compete nicely in terms of power consumption.

The financial advantages of shrinking die sizes are huge. Says IDC's Shane Rau: "It's classic Intel. Shrinking the die gives them more leverage over pricing, allowing them to outmaneuver the competi¬tion in the marketplace any¬time they choose. In a price war it's a huge advantage." In other words, AMD has its hands full. AMD isn't just sitting around idly while Intel kicks its, err ... circuits. According to AMD's Simon Solotko, December should see shipments of the company's quad-core Phenom desktop processors based on its new Stars core, which includes the Hyper Transport 3 bus and support for DDR2-800 memory, plus Opteron-like features such as a shared L3 cache.

AMD has also started ex¬ploring methods of linking the GPU and CPU as an alternative way to improve multimedia performance. FOR THE MOMENT, most users would gain little advantage in upgrading to a Penryn CPU-the chip may not be compatible with your motherboard, the market has few S S E4-optimized applications that would allow it to shine performance-wise, and it will certainly be extremely expensive. And rumors have hinted at new chip sets just down the pike that may offer superior support for the new processor line. So unless you simply must live on the bleeding edge, wait a few months to see how the market shapes up.