Intel has demo'd the 45nm quad-core mobile processor it's planning to release next year. The chip maker claimed it was on track to bring the part to market in H2 2008 - in Q3, to be precise, though that's not a timeframe Intel has yet made public.

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The prototype chip - said to have rolled out of one of the chip giant's fabs mere days ago - contains 840m transistors and is based on Intel's upcoming 45nm 'Penryn' microarchitecture. The transistor count points to an on-board L2 cache extending to 12MB in two 6MB units shared between each core pair.

It's expected to operate over a 1066MHz frontside bus, clearly marking its ability to work with the components of next May's 'Montevina' Centrino update. That said, the quad-core chip isn't expected to be part of the Centrino refresh, thanks to its higher operating temperatures.

The quad-core chip, which will almost certainly ship as a Core 2 Extreme family member, consumes 45W - 10W more than mainstream mobile Core 2 Duos' 35W power envelope but within reach of the kind of cooling technologies available to today's developers of high-end, desktop-replacement gaming notebooks.