Originally Posted by
gOJDO
The TDP is not an issue since Penryn has rated TDP much higher than it should have. That's why we see a 65W TDP Wolfdale wasting 2/3 of the energy wasted by a 65W TDP Conroe. That's why we see a 4.5GHz Wolfdale's on air, which is a mission impossible with a Conroe.
The high rated TDP of Penryn is kind of a backup which Intel is going to (ab)use for the next generation of CPUs. So, Intel are going to introduce same clocked Nehalem CPUs with the same TDP as Penryn and like AMD, Intel are going to claim xx% performance improvement in the same power envelope.
Of course, Nehalem is going to waste more energy because it has much more logic than Penryn, but it has TDP headroom and it has a larger package(larger surface) which will improve the heat transfer from the CPU to the CPU cooler.
The speed of the CPU depends of other, more important factors. One of the factors is the pipeline length. The more stages the CPU has means that each stage will have less complex logic. The less complex logic per stage means faster clocks. Penryn has 14 stages, while Nehalem has 16 or 17. Furthermore, another factor is the desing on a given process. Nehalem is designed up from the ground for the new 45nm process. Unlike Nahelm, Core2 was designed for the 65nm and Penryn as an improved shrink is not optimized for the new process.
IMO, Nehalem will have at least the Penryn frequencies and chances are(again IMO) that it will have slightly higher clocks. For example 15% higher. But we'll have to wait a year before we can see the high clocked parts of Nehalem. Intel will need a decent amount of highly binned Nehalem CPUs for release. Before the release of Nehalem I'm also expecting faster Penryns, ex: 3.6GHz Wolfdale and 3.4GHz Yorkfield/Harpertown.