Intel has the new 45nm Core 2 processors ready. They are coming from the Penryn family and are dubbed Yorkfield for the Core 2 quad-core designs and Wolfdale which is a Core 2 dual-core.

Wolfdale processors are going to be sold as Core 2 Duo E8500 and should have increased clock speeds of 3.16 GHz, have a 1,333 MHz Front Side Bus and consumes less power .Now that I mentioned less power the Wolfdale processors are going to consume 65W at 3.16 GHz while the former lineup was doing 75W at 2.6 - 2.9 GHz. The core voltage level is down to 1.225V from 1.325V.

The fact that Intel shrunk the chips is great. They’re now packing on those 107 mm2 up to 6MB of L2 cache compared to 4MB it had before. Core 2 Duo E8500 processors will use SSD 4.1 instruction sets that will speed things up when it comes to video encoding and comes with common already, hardware virtualization acceleration, execute disable bit (xD), 64-bit processing support, and SSE-2/3 support.

There is one small drawback. Though newer motherboards support 1333 MHz FSB most of them will need a BIOS upgrade to be fully compatible.

The guys at HotHardware managed to make the new Wolfdale Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 to run up to 4.3 GHz so the 3 GHz barrier seems to be way over.  Yes, they overclocked them.  If you want to read a more in depth review check them out.