Difference between Normal and Penryn processors?

[Ryuukumori]

I have literally searched this forums site instead of having to post. Google is also being an a** about differences. So I go to the community.

What is the difference between the normal processors now and the rumored Penryn supposed to be released (hopefully) to a new line of MBPs in the near future? What kind of changes would it make to the Pros now? Thanks for any help.

I have searched, so don't flame me for posting since I have done my job before posting this. Thanks.

 

[r00]

The Penryn based CPUs will consume less power which will result in better battery life and they also support SSE4 which if a given OS or programs use this instruction set can boost performance to almost 40%.

Atleast that's what I've gathered.

 

[JWest]

Well, here are the basic differences:

- Penryn is is built on a 45nm scale, not 65nm like the current procs
- The clock speeds are faster (slightly), the L2 cache has bee increased to 6MB (as compared to 2MB and 4MB in the current procs)
- Because of their smaller dye size, they run cooler and require less energy
- They can use the new SSE4 instruction set (not currently implemented, as developers need time to work with the new instruction set first). This makes it more future proof, because future applications will be able to take advantage of SSE4. Right now, Penryn is only about 0-7% faster than an equally clocked merom proc. When SSE4 is implemented however, there will be a roughly 30% increase in speed over SSE3 procs.

That's it in a nutshell.

 

[wildwobby]

Penryns ARE normal CPUs... atleast in the way you and I think of 'em.

The only difference with Penryn over the current Merom in MacBook Pros is the size of the transistors. 45nm down from 65nm. Benefits include less heat, better performance ~7-10%.... 40% on tasks which take advantage of SSE4 (encoding).

 

[heatmiser]

Like the previous upgrades, you basically get a slightly faster clockspeed and a more efficient core (lower power consumption, better battery life). The big differences come when more cores are added. For example, quad-cores (Nehalem) should be on the way in 2009.