First off, Penryn is designed to support up to a 1600MHz FSB, however we wondered whether desktop chips would even see the faster FSB support given that we haven?t so much as heard of support for it on Intel?s upcoming 3 series chipsets (e.g. P35, X38). It turns out that Intel is only confirming 1600MHz FSB support for Penryn based Xeon processors for the HPC market, not for the mobile or desktop markets. This tells us two things: 1) Intel is feeling AMD?s bandwidth advantage and strength in the HPC market and is using the faster FSB to help level the playing field, and 2) the desktop will most likely not see a FSB faster than 1333MHz.
Remember that with Nehalem being introduced in 2008, Intel will begin shifting away from its aging FSB architecture to a point-to-point interface akin to what AMD introduced with the K8 back in 2003. It doesn?t make a lot of sense for Intel to invest much money into moving cost focused desktop platforms to 1600MHz FSB only to abandon the efforts in a year?s time. While Intel hasn?t said anything, we?re expecting Penryn desktop parts to be 1333MHz FSB only, which makes sense given that the upcoming P35 chipset officially supports a maximum FSB frequency of 1333MHz.