Some of the average computer users that I know got overwhelmed when they first got their hands on a machine powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo chip. With the Core 2 Duo, they thought they already saw it all. But hey, I’m looking forward to seeing their faces when they hear about what aces Intel still has up its sleeve.

The second half of this year is when we start to get to see exactly what these aces are. According to this article on PC World, Intel is slated to bring to the masses the most awaited Penryn chips. These Penryn chips would be the first type of chips that will be introducing to the world Intel’s 45mn manufacturing systems, with high-k dialectric and metal gate transistors. This means we will have faster computers that keep raising clock speeds and yet consuming as constant an amount of power as possible. Sounds neat, doesn’t it?

But it does not end there. The article further states that in early 2008, Intel will start shipping its Nehalen family of CPU chips as well as the Tolapai. If the Penryn chips will give us a taste of what Intel’s 45mn manufacturing system can do, the Nehalen chips will give us a full blast of it. Intel said that the Nehalen chips will have as much as eight cores on a single chip, with an integrated DDR3 memory controller. There will be two threads in each core, as well as a dedicated cache memory, though a large and shared cache is also to be expected. On some Nahalen chips, there will be integrated graphics.

We have yet to read of details as to what exactly the Tolapai is, but people from Intel have already revealed that the Tolapai puts together an x86 processor core with an integrated chipset. Add to that an encryption co-processor. The Tolapai design has dedicated servers in mind, servers that take care of virus scanning as well as encryption.

With all these developments, the CPU as we know it will be radically different from what it once was. It will be all power and speed as we have never known it before. As the PC World article put it:

“As the number of cores increases, so does the number of threads that can be processed simultaneously, opening the door to further performance gains.

I don’t know about you, but I am marking my calendar until 2008.