Intel released some interesting details on its upcoming Penryn and Nehalem CPU families today. Both designs will use Intel's new 45nm manufacturing process, which employs Hi-k metal gates and other innovations to allow for faster, more complex chips that don't draw more power than today's CPUs. Here are a few of the highlights from today's briefing:

What is Penryn?
It's Intel's first 45nm processor core. Starting with its Core 2 Duo design, Intel added a number of improvements to create a new core for desktop, server, and mobile CPUs. Intel has outlined an ambitious plan to speed up its chip releases by introducing a new manufacturing process every other year, and designing a new microarchitecture to take full advantage of that process in each alternate year. Penryn will launch Intel's 45nm process this year. Next year, Intel will release Nehalem, a new architecture built expressly for 45nm.

Faster Chips, New Instructions, Larger Caches
Moving to 45nm allows Intel to keep pushing clock speed while keeping power consumption constant. Desktop Penryn chips will launch at over 3GHz running on a 1333 MHz bus. The server models will step up to a super-fast 1600 MHz bus. Cache gets a boost as well, from 4MB to 6MB for dual core desktop chips and from 8MB to 12MB for quad core. Penryn chips will also include SSE4 instructions to speed up streaming data and multimedia performance.

Super-Powered Single Threads
Here's a great bit of tech in desperate need of a cooler name: Enhanced Dynamic Acceleration Technology. If a Penryn CPU finds itself running single-threaded code and powering down its second core, it can boost the frequency of the first core to plow through that single-threaded code much faster. Since this only happens when the second core is idle, power consumption and heat production remain stable.

So When Can We Get 'em?
According to Intel, server chips will arrive by the end of the year. Desktop and mobile chips will be in production at that time, but will probably not arrive in systems until early 2008.

On to Nehalem!
This is where things really get interesting. Intel based Penryn on the Core 2 Duo architecture it designed for the 65nm process. Nehalem should take full advantage of the 45nm process Intel will introduce this year. Here's what Intel has planned:

    * Two threads per core
    * Up to eight cores on a chip
    * An integrated DDR3 memory controller
    * Integrated graphics on some chips
    * Dedicated cache memory on each core, plus a large shared cache.
    * Production will begin in 2008