Intel, the biggest manufacturer of microchips, announced the launch of Penryn chip range, a move that will put AMD in disadvantage.

According to Doug Cooper, Intel Canada Country Manager , this is the most significant change in semiconductor history in 45 years .

"We are using elements of the periodic table we never touched before, like hafnium." said Doug Cooper

The new flagship processor , the Core 2 Extreme Processor QX 9650 has 820 million transistors including 12 megabytes of onboard cache memory , key to speedier performance.

Penryn includes Intel Streaming SIMD Extensions 4 (SSE4) instructions, the largest unique instruction set addition since the original SSE Instruction Set Architecture (ISA). This extends the Intel 64 instruction set architecture to expand the performance and capabilities of the Intel architecture.

The target of the new chip are the computer enthusiasts, as its price is double compared to the average home PC. But it represents technology that quickly trickles down to consumer and business.

According to Sean Maloney, Intel's chief sales and marketing officer, said the chips' increased computing power would begin the transformation of herky-jerky video posted on YouTube and other streaming video sites into high-resolution, full-screen quality that could compete with HDTV.

“Its biggest impact is high-definition video,” he said. “It will be highly addictive.”

The first products based on the new manufacturing technology will be Intel Core 2 and Xeon microprocessors, Intel said. Chips for notebook computers, marketed as the Intel Core 2 Extreme and Intel Core 2 Duo, are scheduled to be available in the first quarter of 2008. A processor for higher-end server multiprocessing systems is also under development.