Intel decided to bring forward its processors based on the 45 nanometer technology and built on the quad core architecture, sooner than it was expected, that is in the last quarter of 2007. The manufacturing company hopes that move will allow it to better compete against its rival quad core server and desktop processors. The first quad core AMD products hit the market this month and they are expected to make a big splash because of a number of new technologies used.

According to information from the news site X-bit labs, Intel is planning an "Extreme" version of its 45nm processor named the "Intel Core Extreme" sometime during the fourth quarter of 2007. According to X-bit labs' information the "launch of the Intel Core Extreme processor pulls into Q4'07", at the same time saying that the definitive brand name of this product is not yet determined. Some things are clear though, like the maximum frequency that will be reached with the top of the line model (3.33GHz) and the speed of the frontside bus (1333MHz) and the total amount of level two cache memory (12MB). Intel is planning a slow transition to the production technology needed by the 45 nanometer processors as initially only about 2 or 3 percent of the total chip production will be composed of Yorkfield CPUs (quad core, 45 nm). This proportion is expected to rise to 5 or 6 percent in the second quarter of 2008, reaching 30 percent afterwards. "Initially it was projected that Intel's new quad-core processors based on improved micro-architecture that is usually referred to as "Penryn" will be launched in the first quarter of 2008, but the company has changed its plans and now such chips will be available already in the fourth quarter of 2007, in time to compete against AMD Phenom processors based on the K10 micro-architecture".

Intel's new Penryn processors will have a greater instructions per clock (IPC) execution that is hoped will enable them to be faster and more energy efficient than their counterparts from AMD are. Besides the new SSE4 instruction set, the 45nm processors will include the Unique Super Shuffle Engine and the Radix 16 technique. The Unique Super Shuffle Engine (USSE for short) is a "full-width, single-pass shuffle unit that is 128-bits wide, which can perform full-width shuffles in a single cycle", that significantly improves the performance when executing multimedia instructions from the SSE family set as they are based on "shuffle-like operations such as pack, unpack and wider packed shifts". Intel hopes that this feature will make a performance difference "or content creation, imaging, video and high-performance computing".

Radix 16 technique, according to Intel, roughly doubles the divider speed over previous generations for computations used in nearly all applications. In addition, Intel also improved virtualization technology as well as added some features to dynamic acceleration technology, which is supposed to boost single-threaded applications' performance on multi-core chips.