Patrick Gelsinger, the general manager for Intel's digital enterprise group has pledged that its Penryn processors will be 45 percent faster than current chips.

He said that the shift to 45 nanometer technology will mean huge gains in high-performance computing and bandwidth intensive applications.

Speaking to the Intel Developer Forum in Beijing Gelsinger said that a prototype Penryn chip with four processing cores, translated into 40 per cent faster performance in computer games and video processing, while more mundane tasks such as image processing ran about 15 per cent faster.

Successors to Penryn, a family of chips known as Nehalem, will make their debut in 2008 with an overhauled design and featuring up to eight processing cores, double that of current top-of-the-line chips, he said.

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