Alex Hopmann’s Blog

With the IDF (Intel Developer Forum) going on this week there are a bunch of new reports about the upcoming Intel CPUs. The performance numbers for the new Penryn chips look like they are nice, but just a little bit better at the same clock speeds. More troubling, while it seemed from earlier reports that the chips would be out this summer, the recent reports all say either “end of this year” or “H1 2008″, both of which feel like they are way off.

So why do I care about waiting for the die shrink? When the transistors shrink, they can run from lower voltages and (given constant clock speed and features) consume much less power. They also let Intel come out with higher clocked parts, but even buying the same clock speed you can today you get a much more efficient chip, and hopefully prices also come down quite a bit since Intel can make more of them on a wafer. By waiting for this next generation you get (a) chips that are 10-20% faster at the same clock speeds, (b) chips that use 40% less power at the same clock speeds, (c) the option to increase the clock speeds by 20%.

All of this suggests that if I’ve got to wait I’m likely upgrading the video card in my existing media center box relatively soon (with that nice Gigabyte silent 8600GTS or possibly something from ATI/AMD if they come out with something even better) and holding off on the bigger upgrades until “the end of the year”, whenever that turns out to be.

Given the industry’s reluctance to ship something during the middle of the holiday season I’m hoping that “the end of the year” is actually no later than October. And sure, by the time Penryn comes out, there will be another generation on the way with even better stuff.

I haven’t seen any news from IDF yet about improvements in Intel virtualization technology. This is going to be a cornerstone for next generation computing experiences so I’d be shocked if Intel isn’t going to say something about it.