It sure seems like we’ve been hearing about Intel’s 45nm Penryn platform forever–we’ve even seen machines from HP and Lenovo that use the new chips. Preemptive hype aside, today is the day that Penryns finally hit store shelves, much to the excitement of hardware enthusiasts and hardcore number-crunchers everywhere. As expected, there are 16 different CPUs at launch, ranging from quad-core workstation-class chips down to dual-core desktop CPUs. The highest of the high-end is the Core 2 Extreme QX9650–a quad-core, 3.0Ghz monster that retails for $1000 in quantities of 1000 or more. Next up are 12 different quad-core Xeons, which range in speed from 2.0 to 3.2Ghz, offer 1333Mhz to 1600Mhz in the frontside bus department and 12MB of L2 cache. Then there’s three dual-core Xeons, which top off at 3.4Ghz with FSB speeds up to 1600Mhz and 6MB of cache. Holding down the low-end is the dual-core E5205 Xeon, which clocks in at 1.86Ghz with a 1066Mhz FSB–it retails for $177 in quantities of 1000 or more. All of these new CPUs are compatible with server platforms that use the Intel 5000 family of chipsets–additionally, the company is releasing new 5400, 5100 and 3200 chipsets for use with Penryns and various server configurations.

For the full scoop:
– see this press release