There must be a few more long faces at AMD this week. Intelreally knows how to kick a man when he's down. The threat of Intel's might inprocess technology has been looming all year, but now the 45nm Penryn hasarrived,the misery of AMD's second place will be smarting even more.

So why has Intel only launched at 3GHz - no faster than theCore 2 Extreme QX6850? The answer is that there's no need to push the clocksjust yet. But there's clearly plenty in the bank ready. It's going to be atleast another six months before AMD gets its own 45nm process out the door.

Less Watts means more clocks

Although the performance of the new chip is a slightimprovement, thanks to 50 per cent more Level 2 cache and some other cleverwidgets, our biggest surprise when we took our first look at Penryn on thedesktop was just how little power the new CPU draws - a full 60W less in our tests.

If Penryn were just a 45nm version of the 65nm Core 2, itwould take up half the area of its predecessor and the power reduction would beexpected. But the 50 per cent more Level 2 cache and other extra transistorsbring the grand total to around 800 million for a quad-core part - compared tounder 600 million transistors for a Kentsfield Core 2 Quad.

So the die is only around 65per cent the size, making the power savings even more extraordinary. Intel hasits High-K insulator and metal gate technology to thank for this.

The much lower power consumption is not just a relief forthose living in fear of global warming, however. It's great news for speedfreaks too, as it will also mean a higher ceiling on clock speeds. So eventhough our first taste of Penryn goodness, the Core 2 Extreme QX9650, runs atthe same 3GHz speed as its QX6850 predecessor, you're certain to be able to getmore out of it.

3DMarks the spot

The G0 stepping already showed what a lower power chip cando,but Penryn is in a totally different league. A heavy-hitting overclocking team,including hipro5, Shamino and Kingpin, has already taken a QX9650 to 5.6GHz,and kept it stable enough to achieve the top score of 29,061 in 3DMark06. In fact,the top three scores for 3DMark06 are already with QX9650s.Shamino has pushed the QX9650 even further to 6GHz (twice its stock clock!!!), although without breaking any world benchmarkingrecords.

Shamino, hipro5 and their chums use extreme overclockingtricks like multi-stage cascades (where one refrigeration loop cools the nextone to even lower temperatures, and so on) or liquid nitrogen to achieve theirphenomenal results. So we can't expect results quite that enormous at home.

Forthe rest of us, using more mundane water or premium air cooling, there willstill be impressive gains to be had, however. Where the QX6850 was capable ofas much as 3.8GHz, with the right board and the best air cooling around, theQX9650 seems capable of as much as 4.5GHz with just a cheap cooler.

So it looks like Intel has the next six months all mappedout, with lesser Penryns on track for a January release. And if AMD does manageto put up a fight with its native quad-core Phenom, there will be plenty moreavailable from Penryn to head off the challenge.