Intel's announcement yesterday about its 45-nm Penryn set to launch this year followed by the 2008 debut of the Nehalem CPU family generated the usual industry hype, but I saw little, if any, coverage about what next-generation processors will mean for the average user.
Sure, the processors' specs are amazing on a purely intellectual level. The Penryn, for example, will offer a staggering number of 820-million transistors, boost virtual machine transition by up to 75%, offer greater than 3-GHz clockspeeds, pack integrated memory and graphics, and the list goes on. Initial disclosures about the Nehalem revealed that some of the processors will have eight cores and should, of course, beat its predecessor's specs. More than 15 45-nm designs will be on offer (remember when the choices only comprised the Pentium and Celeron for the desktop and laptop?).
This is exciting news if you love computing for computing's sake or run a server room or you want x86 machines to run faster and not necessarily hotter. But where does that leave the rest of us? Aside from AI, games will not benefit tremendously from the extra processor speed--the graphics card will do most of the graphics heavy lifting. And as for office apps, well just how fast do you need to open up a word processor or spreadsheet document?
