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Starting from November 12th, Intel will launch 16 new Penryn based processors. The initial launch will primarily be Xeon processors, but one desktop processor, the QX9650 is also being launched. The new Penryn based processors feature Intel’s new 45nm High-k metal gate silion process that features transistors with reduced current leakage: the result? Lower power consumption and increase clock speeds. The Penryn also features incremental improvements to the Core 2 architecture.
The move from 65nm to 45nm involves more than just a shrink of current chip designs. The processors include such additional features as new Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 4 (SSE4), which are 47 new instructions that speed up workloads including video encoding for high-definition and photo manipulation, as well as key HPC and enterprise applications. Software vendors supporting the new SSE4 instruction set include Adobe*, Microsoft* and Symantec*.
Additional processor performance enhancing architectural features include:
- Enhanced Intel® Virtualization Technology — Virtual machine transition (entry/exit) times are improved by an average of 25 to 75 percent through hardware with no changes to software required.
- Fast Division of Numbers – A fast divider roughly doubles the speed over previous generations for computations used in nearly all applications through a technique called Radix 16. The ability to divide instructions and commands faster increases a computer’s performance.
- Unique Super Shuffle Engine — By implementing a wider 128-bit shuffle unit, performance significantly improves for SSE-related instructions that have shuffle-like operations. This feature will increase performance for content creation, imaging, video and high-performance computing.