Intel will begin producing its next-generation "Penryn" processors by the end of 2007, using greater power efficiency to push improved Core 2 and Xeon chips to speeds over 3GHz..

The Penryn design calls for shrinking Intel's current Core microarchitecture from chips using 65-nanometer feature sizes to 45nm. To prevent electricity from leaking between transistors packed so closely together, the chip will use novel "high-k, metal gate" materials to provide better insulation.

The Penryn chip will also have better power management than previous Intel processors, with deeper sleep states than Core 2 Duo chips. Thanks to that efficiency, Intel plans to run its new chips faster than 3GHz for desktop and notebook versions, reversing an industry trend of scaling back the processor speed in order to add more cores without creating too much heat.

In other improvements, Intel will use 50 percent more on-chip memory in Penryn chips than Core 2 Duo, allowing them to hold more data on the chip instead of spending time and energy retrieving it from the PC's main memory bank. Dual-core Penryn chips will have 6M bytes of L2 cache while quad-core versions have 12M bytes. Intel said it also will speed Penryn front side bus speeds to 1600MHz, instead of the 1066MHz or 1333MHz options now available, granting up to a 45 percent improvement for high-performance computing applications like computational fluid dynamics.