Intel has completed its first 45nm processor, 'Penryn', ensuring the part will successfully run Windows Vista, Mac OS X and Linux, the chip giant said yesterday. The news comes just over a month after Intel began offering engineering samples of the chip.

Penryn will go into production during the second half of this year, with the bulk of its processors being fabbed at 45nm during 2008. Penryn - the name for the 45nm and tweaked Core 2 architecture rather than a CPU itself - will form the basis for the dual-core 'Wolfdale' and the quad-core 'Yorkfield', respectively the successors to today's 65nm Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad chips.

Penryn will extend the Core 2 architecture - it's expected to play host to the fourth set of Intel's Streaming SIMD Extensions (SSE), a further 48 instructions designed to improve the processor's ability to handle multimedia applications. Penryn will also introduce two further instructions dubbed by Intel "application-targeted accelerators".

Penryn will be play a key part of 'Montevina', Intel's next-but-one generation of its Centrino mobile platform. Montevina's likely to appear in H1 2008, a year after the next Centrino, 'Santa Rosa'. In the second half of 2008, just as AMD is beginning to roll out its own 45nm CPUs, Intel is scheduled to introduce 'Nehalem', the successor architecture to Core 2.