With Intel's Penryn set to launch next quarter, Intel has decided to shed some light on improvements it has made to the architecture, and prove that Penryn is not just a shrunk Conroe.

Intel has decided to improve existing Wide Dynamic Execution, Advanced Smart Cache, Advanced Digital Media Boost and Intelligent Power Capability, technologies that previously made their debut with Conroe and Merom.

Below is Intel's Tick-Tock long term roadmap, as well as "Penryn" plans (source: HKEPC)Penryn enhances Wide Dynamic Execution technology with a fast radix-16 divider and improved Virtualization technology, which should boost divide instruction capability and reduce virtual machine transition latencies by 25-to-75%.

Advanced Smart Cache not only increases the cache size (6MB and 12MB L2-cache on dual and quad-core CPUs, respectively), but also reduces its latency.

Advanced Digital Media Boost technology is the inclusion of a new Intel SSE4 instruction set. SSE4 introduces 47 new instructions to improve performance of video accelerators, graphics building blocks and streaming load. Intel claims a 2x performance gain in video acceleration tasks. There are 14 new instructions for video accelerator performance enhancement. Intel improves compiler auto-vectorization performance with 32 new instructions.

Intel expects SSE4 optimizations to deliver performance improvements in video authoring, imagine, graphics, video search, off-chip accelerators, gaming and physics applications.

Mobile Penryn processors receive enhanced power saving technologies. New to the mobile Penryn is a deep power down state. In the deep power down state, the processor lowers the core voltage, more so than in the C4 state, and turns off the L1 and L2 caches. Intel claims significant power savings in idle modes for extended battery life with the new power state.