Intel Corp. has decided to bring the launch of its 45nm quad-core chips forward to the fourth quarter of 2007. This will allow the company to be in full position to compete against the new family of products by its main rival Advanced Micro Devices.

According to documents seen by X-bit labs, Intel will release its new “Intel Core Extreme” processor with four processing engines made using 45nm process technology in Q4 2007. The document states that “launch of the Intel Core Extreme processor pulls into Q4’07,” emphasizing that the actual brand-name of the product is not yet determined. What is highly likely is that the top-of-the range extreme processor will be clocked at 3.33GHz, will use 1333MHz processor system bus and will have 12MB of level-two cache in total.

Contemporary mainboards based on Intel 3-series chipsets already support Intel’s 45nm central processing units, whereas some mainboard makers, namely Asustek Computer, have also enabled support for the new chips on previous-generation motherboards.

Initially there will be only about 2% - 3% of Intel’s desktop chips code-named Yorkfield made using 45nm process technology in the chipmaker’s product mix, however, the share of quad-core 45nm offerings will increase to 5% - 6% in Q2 2008, whereas the volume of 45nm products will get to little less than 30% of the desktop product mix in the second quarter next year.

Initially it was projected that Intel’s new quad-core processors based on improved micro-architecture that is usually referred to as “Penryn” will be launched in the first quarter of 2008, but the company has changed its plans and now such chips will be available already in the fourth quarter of 2007, in time to compete against AMD Phenom processors based on the K10 micro-architecture.

Intel announced in March that the new “Penryn” chips produced using 45nm process technology will have greater instructions per clock (IPC) execution, which means that they will be faster and more efficient even at the same clock-speeds with the current generation chips. Besides, the new chips will be able to run at higher clock-speeds compared to today’s Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad products.

The major micro-architectural improvements for new Intel Core 2 processors, besides SSE4 instruction set, include the so-called Unique Super Shuffle Engine and Radix 16 technique. The Super Shuffle Engine is a full-width, single-pass shuffle unit that is 128-bits wide, which can perform full-width shuffles in a single cycle. This significantly improves performance for SSE2, SSE3 and SSE4 instructions that have shuffle-like operations such as pack, unpack and wider packed shifts. This feature will increase performance for content creation, imaging, video and high-performance computing. Radix 16 technique, according to Intel, roughly doubles the divider speed over previous generations for computations used in nearly all applications. In addition, Intel also improved virtualization technology as well as added some features to dynamic acceleration technology, which is supposed to boost single-threaded applications’ performance on multi-core chips.

Each of Intel’s dual-core Penryn chips will have 410 million transistors, up significantly from 291 million of current dual-core Conroe processors, however, thanks to 45nm process technology, the chips will have die size of 107 square millimeters, down about 25% from 155 square millimeters of the Conroe.