A Chip is Born with 820 Million Pumpin’ New 45nm Transistors

It’s like those blockbuster movie reviews: “Sweet sensation!” “A thrill ride that rattled my bones and rocked my world!”

This week we got to see the first reviews of the soon-to-be-released Core 2 Extreme Edition designed with brand new Intel transistors. Manufactured in the new $3 billion high-volume Fab in Arizona, the new quad core processors:

• are built using a new 45nm process technology based on Intel’s breakthrough in ‘reinventing’ certain areas of the transistors inside its processors to reduce energy leakage
• have new smaller transistors (45nm vs. 65 nm) use a Hafnium-based high-k material for the gate dielectric and metal materials for the gate
• have transistors that are so small that more than 2 million can fit on the period at the end of this sentence.
• will be faster, more energy efficient compared to previous Extreme Edition generations, plus they’re lead- and halogen-free

You can read full reviews here. Some of coolest quotes:

“All signs point to, “Wow!”" — HardOCP

“The new Core 2 Extreme QX9650 is simply the fastest processor for gaming, media encoding and just about anything else you could do on your PC” — PC Perspective

“Less Noise, More Efficiency, More Speed and More Overclocking Potential!” — Tom’s Hardware

“Intel has pulled off a pretty remarkable achievement with the Core 2 Extreme QX9650’s…” — Firing Squad

“The Yorkfield-based Core 2 Extreme QX9650 is a success in every sense of the word” — Hot Hardware

“For now, the QX9650 represents the pinnacle of Intel desktop CPUs—and it’s simply the fastest desktop CPU on the market today” — Extremetech

See it in gaming action from this IDF video:

Here’s how the tiny, new transistors will make a big splash in future supercomputers: