The chips will achieve a significant increase in performance without consuming more power.

It will be the most fundamental design change in its chips since it introduced the Pentium Pro family of chips in 1996.

Intel said it plans to introduce a basic architecture for its microprocessors by 2008. Intel competes with AMD (Charts) and Texas Instruments.

The Penryn design calls for shrinking Intel's current Core microarchitecture from chips using 65-nanometre feature sizes to 45nm. To prevent electricity from leaking between transistors packed so closely together, the chip will use novel "high-k, metal gate" materials to provide better insulation. IBM has also announced plans to use a version of high-k, metal gate design, but has not announced plans to bring it to market as fast.

The Penryn chip will also have better power management than previous Intel processors, with deeper sleep states than Core 2 Duo chips. Thanks to that efficiency, Intel plans to run its new chips faster than 3GHz for desktop and notebook versions, reversing an industry trend of scaling back the processor speed in order to add more cores without creating too much heat.

Read more and Macworld