The first wave of Intel’s much-hyped Penryn processors will touch down on November 12, with server and high-end desktop superslabs leading the charge.
Speaking at this morning’s kick-off of Intel’s IDF techfest in San Francisco, company president and CEO Paul Otellini said that the 45nm Penryn-class chips would initially be offered in 20 flavours.
“There’ll be a large number of SKUs launched on November 12 for servers and high-end desktops. In the first quarter of 2008 you’ll see additional SKUs including products for the mainstream desktop and mobile markets”.
Those notebook chips will include a refresh to the current Santa Rosa platform, but will be followed in the middle of 2008 by the fifth generation Centrino platform dubbed Montevina.
Penryn will debut in some 20 versions: Intel boss Paul Otellini shows the ‘Extreme Waffleboard’ edition which can be used to provide music for Rolf Harris songs
Otellini confirmed that it would include “WiMAX and will have native support for both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. We’ll also take the form factor, the footprint, down by 50%”. The WiMAX radio will be integrated into a multiband Wi-Fi module codenamed Echo Peak. Otellini said that Acer, Asus, Lenovo, Panasonic and Toshiba had all committed to include WiMAX in their Montevino-class notebooks.
Sitting at the bottom end of the Penryn family tree would be “a very small (system on a chip) based on Silverthorne core to address the needs of ultra-low power portable computing”.
While Penryn is based on the current Core 2 microarchitecture, 2008 will mark the debut of the all-new Nehalem microarchitecture. “The design is complete, it was finished around a month ago, and we’re on track for the second half 2008″ said Otellini.
He also revealed that Nehalem would employ “a very dynamic and modular design with the ability to change the configuration of cores, cache size, IO and so forth to meet the needs of diverse (market) segments.”
The premium Nehalem chip will have eight cores on a single die, with an on-die memory controller and a new system interconnect called QuickPath – a feature set that clearly marks Nehalem as Intel’s challenger to AMD’s Barcelona and its HyperTransport feed.
A demo showed a prototype Nehalem machine running Windows XP, while Otellini said they’d also been able to boot Apple’s Mac OS X.
In 2009 the GPU would move into the 45nm Nehalem die, “at which point in time it becomes part of the microprocessor” said Otellini, who also forecast that “both the microprocessor and the graphics will be designed from scratch to hit the launch of 32nm” with the arrival of Nehalem’s 32nm successor ‘Sandy Bridge’ in 2010.