At the fall Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Intel announced plans to release a series of new processors and micro architectures due for arrival in 2006. First on the agenda was news of the Woodcrest, Conroe, and Napa platforms for Server, Desktop and Notebook platforms.

Conroe chips are the successor to Presler Pentium D processors, and are inspired by the current Pentium M platform used in many notebook PCs. The new architectures de-emphasise clock speeds and instead focus on the amount of performance that can be extracted per watt.

According to Intel, Conroe chips will give up to 5x better performance per watt than Northwood CPUs used in Pentium 4 processors, but the firm refused to reveal details of final product implementation. In true PCW style, we plied several key Intel representatives with drink and managed to extract unconfirmed reports that the initial batch of Conroe chips will run between 2.8GHz and 3.4GHz.

All Conroe chips will be fabricated using a 65 nanometre process and are expected to utilise far less power than current Pentium 4s. Most will use two cores on a single die, but single-core implementations are being planned to replace mainstream Prescott CPUs.