The biggest central processing unit manufacturing company is expected to launch its latest generation of processors, the Penryns, sometime in November and the first to hit the market is going to be the Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650, which is according to its name the top offering that Intel launches now for the gamers and enthusiast market segment.

The new generation of processing units from Intel is based on the 45 nanometer fabrication process and their high level of performance was advertised rather aggressively during the Intel Developer Forum by the manufacturing company that posted a range of comparisons between the Wolfdale and Conroe architectures. From these benchmarks it is clear that the quad core processor architecture based on the 45nm fabrication technology is much better than the dual core one, as quad core's results were even 25 percent higher than the one achieved by the older processors.

When comparing 45nm processors with 65nm processors all based on the quad core architecture, some benchmarks are revealing significant performance gains while others are showing little or no difference. Overall, it looks like the 45nm based architecture brings an average performance boost of around 5 or 10 percent.

According to the news site nordichardware, the new Intel processors from the Penryn family of products will all use the 1333MHz frontside bus and the quad core line will be priced between $266 and $530, while the lower end dual core versions will come with price tags between $163 and $266. The top of the line Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 processor will come with the higher price tag of $999 and that only for those products purchased in 1000-piece quantities.

On the second level of cache memory, the new Intel processors will range between two and 12MB, while most of the products will come with a 6MB cache memory. Very important for an Intel manufactured central processing unit, the running frequency of these products will range between 2.5GHz and 3.0GHz for the QX9650 model.