Quote Originally Posted by bowman View Post
Penryn is just a die shrink of Conroe with a few enhancements. It was originally designed for 65nm. Nehalem is designed from the ground-up to be built on the 45nm process technology.

Even if they've enhanced it there's supposed to be gains from designing it ground up for the already tried and true process technology.
Exactly... and there are numerous reports that when Intel caught wind of AMD doing a native quad on 65nm, they simply admitted they couldn't do it. An interesting statement given the struggles that AMD has had but at the same time a bit of endorsement to AMD's engineering to have been able to pull it off.

At any rate, I think both AMD and Intel will demonstrate that 45nm is "the" process at which a native quad becomes really viable.