INTEL Corporation keeps on working at a faster pace than AMD. Remember that the guys at AMD do not have any 65nm parts on the market yet whereas INTEL has been selling 65nm CPUs for more than a year. And just when AMD was about to release its own 65nm line in hope of catching up with INTEL at least when regarding the manufacturing technology, INTEL announced that they have sampled their first 45nm CPUs.

"We are processing the first samples of the Penryn design. These samples will go back to the design team to determine if design is working as expected," said Mark Bohr, director of process architecture and integration at INTEL Corp. As usual, INTEL will test the life out of the new CPUs before they will be released onto the market. And why shouldn't they? INTEL has all the time in the world to develop a new AMD "killer". And they know that AMD can't catch them.

It seems that INTEL really wants to respect its roadmaps. Future 45nm plans include no less than 15 different types of CPUs to be released in the 45nm line. No details regarding these new products came out but we do know that Penryn will incorporate SSE4 instructions and that it will naturally have a smaller die and TDP due to the manufacturing process. That will allow for more energy efficient CPUs to be developed (especially for the Merom mobile line) but it will also translate into the ability to mount more that 2 Dual Cores per die, opening up the road to 8-core CPUs, maybe even more. However, native quad core solutions are still missing from the roadmaps.