The 45nm Intel Core 3 Duo & Quad line of processors will arrive later this year. They will be packing a punch with loads of new features and some big numbers. Chips will be clocked as high as 3.2 GHz and front side bus speeds will peek at 1.6 GHz. One big feature, SSE4, the obvious successor to SSE3, will improve the speed of tasks like video encoding by up to 40%. Virtualization will see a speed bump of up to 75% depending upon conditions.

Worth the Wait

Other improvements to virtualization might mean that we will be seeing the doors open up for multiple operating systems running simultaneously at the hardware level. The standard L2 cache will be 6MB, and Intel Core 3 Duo & Quad processors will consume up to 50% less power than Core 2 Duo equivalents. Looks like we are in for a treat.

Filed under: Computers, Intel