Chip manufacturer Intel has announced that it will begin using two "dramatically new" materials that can boost performance as well as reduce power consumption according to an article on MacNN.

The new chips, which will feature 45 nanometer transistors, will be used in upcoming versions of of the company's Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quad and Xeon processors. The new chips should find their way to the Macintosh market by the second half of 2007 according to the article.

Intel has stated that it currently has five early-version products, codenamed "Penryn", up and running and that these chips are focused on five different computer market segments including the Mac OS X, Windows and Linux operating systems.

The new chips are based around a new material called "high-k" as well as a combination of new metal materials which alter how the transistors behave and perform. The Penryn architecture will feature more than 400 million transistors in the dual-core chips and more than 800 million transistors in the quad-core chips with up to 12 megabytes of cache and approximately 50 new SSE4 chip-level instructions to assist with multimedia and high end computing processes.