CES 2008: Intel Introduces Penryn Platform

In an evolutionary move forward, Intel unveiled today the first Penryn laptop processors. This makes the new platform a refresh of the Santa Rosa platform that was introduced last year. This new platform uses the Mobile Intel 965 express chipset, which comes with support for the Penryn processors, wireless connectivity and graphical subsystems.

Overall five new processors have been introduced. Among these there are four mainstream processors which use 45nm microprocessor architecture. This is the main change in this platform as it marks a move from 65nm to 45nm. This will help the mobile platform, as the new architecture will be more energy efficient and powerful. Though clock speed will be in the same range (1.9 to 2.7) the upper end processors will receive a 6 MB L2 cache as compared to the previous iteration of 2 and 4 MB.

Notebooks that utilize these processors have already been announced and will begin to appear soon.