ACCORDING TO Reuters, Intel has taped out Penryn and is starting to sample it. These 45 nanometre chips are going to be a shrink of Merom/Conroe/ Woodcrest with some goodies sprinkled on top. We first told you about them a year and a half ago, and not much looks to have changed.
The basics are the same as the current core, it is just tweaked. The big thing is that cache will be upped to 6MB from 4, basically they will be catching up to AMD here (Note: I am going to get phone calls over that one...). The other biggie will be the clocks, no not the top end, the dividers. Look for it to be in the 3.46-3.73GHz range when all is said and done, but they will support half-clock dividers. This means instead of the rather absurd 333MHz steps they have now, they can do 166MHz.