Can’t say I saw this one coming: cutting off rival AMD at the pass, Intel has announced its 45nm, next-generation Penryn chips will arrive ahead of schedule, hitting store shelves during the fourth quarter of this year. Given how often new chip lines get delayed (*cough*Barcelona*cough*), it’s genuinely shocking to see Intel rolling these out ahead of schedule, especially considering the engineering hurdles that must be cleared in order to transition to a 45nm manufacturing process. Nonetheless, Intel promises the 45nm chips will arrive in time for Christmas, under the “Intel Core Extreme” brand. Current reports say the high-end quad-core chip is likely to top off at 3.33Ghz, with a 1333Mhz system bus and 12MB of L2 cache. While such a chip is guaranteed to be niche (read: expensive as all get-out), Intel hopes to transition a number of its more mainstream lines to the 45nm process in 2008.

For more on the advent of Penryn:
– see this article from Xbit Labs