Intel Core 2 Extreme QX9650 - Penryn Ticks Ahead

Recap: When's a Penryn?

In our first Penryn preview we laid out the launch schedule for Intel's new chips; now we can finally bring you an update with more specifics including model numbers and clock speeds. Let's first look at a table that will round out the rest of 2007:

The big new introduction here is the Core 2 Extreme QX9650, the very first Yorkfield and the first Penryn we'll see on the desktop. The QX9650 will officially launch on November 12 and although Intel hasn't revealed pricing, we're expecting it to be at $999 thus replacing the QX6850. Given that it costs Intel less money to make than a QX6850, we'd expect Intel would want to sell more of the QX9650 anyways, and pricing it more than $999 just isn't going to help that cause.

The more interesting table however is what happens starting next year, because that's where we get some of the more mainstream Penryn chips in the market:

Look at those availability dates: Penryn is coming for your children in Q1 '08; only the E8300 and Wolfdale 3M parts won't be out until Q2. Clocks move up a little, the QX9770 goes to 3.20GHz thanks to a 1600MHz FSB (which will be enabled by Intel's upcoming X48 chipset - yep another one), and the E8500 brings mainstream chips up to 3.16GHz.

Now look at the "Replaces?" column to get an idea for where these things will be priced. Intel's own roadmap shows the Q9550 slotting in next to the current Q6700, which means that we may be able to find it priced at around $530.

More interesting is that Intel seems to have segmented the affordable quad-core market a bit, by replacing the ever-popular Q6600 with two chips: a Q9450 and Q9300. While functionally identical, the Q9300 is built off of two Wolfdale 3M cores (meaning it only has 6MB total L2 cache) while the Q9450 is built off of two Wolfdale 6M cores giving it 12MB of total L2 cache. Obviously the 9300 will be cheaper to make, so we'd expect to see that at or below the $266 price point of the Q6600. The Q9450 would slot in right above the 9300 in pricing.

We would hope that Intel will price the Q9300 below the $266 price point (can we have a sub-$200 quad-core, please?), because it will actually have less cache than the current Q6600 making it cheaper for Intel to make, but possibly reducing performance over current chips. Granted it will have all the Penryn enhancements which, as you will soon see, do improve performance but we generally like having our cake and eating it too.

The dual-core market also gets interesting, with the E8000 line replacing the current E6000 series. If Intel's pricing structure remains the same then it looks like at today's prices you'll end up with an extra 166MHz, 50% more cache, SSE4 and some other tweaks for the same money. We also have to mention how well the model numbers work out with the Core 2 products; everything is in nice increments of 100, just like when Conroe first launched. Ah those were the days....

The other important item to note on the roadmap going forward is that top line in the table - yep, the one that says Bloomfield. Bloomfield is none other than Nehalem, the 45nm successor to Penryn. It's a brand new architecture complete with an on-die memory controller, SMT (Symmetric Multi-Threading - 2 threads per core) and 8MB of shared cache (probably L3 shared among all four cores). While it's still a year away, it's very nice to see it on an Intel roadmap this far in advance of its launch.