New lab to produce upcoming Penryn CPUs due for release on November 12.

Chip giant Intel today announced the opening of its first high-volume 45-nanometre fabrication factory in Chandler, Arizona.

The new facility will make processors for desktops, notebooks and servers including the up-coming and much-hyped Penryn chips due on November 12.

Nicknamed “Fab 32”, the new factory is Intel’s sixth fab lab to punch out chips on 300mm diameter wafers.

While it isn’t the company’s first 45nm factory (the first was a smaller development facility in Oregon and opened in January this year), it is the first to begin high-volume production. Two further 45nm factories are to come on line in 2008 – one in Israel and the other in New Mexico.

Fab 32 is said to be large enough to fit 17 American football fields inside its one-million square-foot building. The factory will also provide more than 1000 jobs in the field of production and engineering.

"The opening of Fab 32 in Arizona today is a testament to Intel's continued investment in our most strategic asset -- the most advanced, environmentally friendly manufacturing network in the world," said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO. "The magic of 45nm and our new transistor design allow us to deliver high-performance, energy-efficient processors to our customers across the entire spectrum of market segments, from the most powerful servers to a variety of mobile devices and everything in between."

Penryn is the codename for Intel’s next-generation of CPU for the desktop, server and mobile markets. As many as 20 different chip options will be released on launch day with more to come in the early months of 2008.

Otellini outlined the company’s plans for Penryn at the recent Intel Developers Forum in September as part of his keynote address.

“At the heart of the platform is Penryn, it's the microprocessor, and our next microprocessor is Penryn. This is taking the same Core 2 microarchitecture, which is shipping today on 65 nanometres and moving into the next generation of silicon technology. Penryn, in the large Quad-Core configuration is a 410-million-transistor die. We will launch these products on November 12th, about two months from now. And it is the first of 20 unique microprocessors that are being developed on 45 nanometres -- that scale of products I showed a few minutes ago -- that's coming out. There'll be a large number of SKUs that are launched on November 12th for servers and for high-end desktops. And then, in the first quarter of 2008, you'll see us bring out another 15 or 20 SKUs or so to address not just those markets, but also the mobile markets as we move this technology into the mainstream across all of our product lines.”