Intel gave some indication this week of what you can expect from its first 45nm leakage-resisting Hi-k metal gate processors, the Penryn family, a bunch of quad- and dual-cores due out later this year.

In desktops figure 15% better performance on image-related application; 25% on 3D rendering; 40% on games; and 40% faster video encoding with Intel SSE4 optimized video encoders.

Intel says it got the number running a pre-production 3.33 Penryn quad with a 1,333MHz front-side bus and a 12MB cache against one of those 2.93GHz Extreme quads it introduced last week that has a 1,066 FSB and 8 megs of cache.

On the HPC and workstation side, figure a 45% improvement on bandwidth-intensive apps and 25% on servers running Java and that's against the current quad Xeon 5355.

After Penryn comes Nehalem and its eight cores in 2008, which are also supposed to integrate graphics like the AMD-ATI Fusion project.

Intel is expecting to field its high-end quad- and dual-core Caneland chips, a k a Tigerton, for multiprocessors next quarter and says there will be 50W and 80W versions for blades. Caneland will complete Xeon's transition to Intel's Core microarchitecture.

The much-heralded Santa Rosa Centrino platform is due soon along with the Bear Lake chipset, now formally dubbed the Intel Series 3, that's meant to improve graphics support.