HP and Lenovo rushed out with the news that they're gonna be selling Intel's new 45nm Penryn chips in workstations a few days before Intel formally launches the chip this weekend.

The press releases must have been burning a first-to-market hole in their pockets and may be a warning to AMD.

Intel is supposed to line up and push out 16 of the little Penryn critters on Sunday aiming them at servers and high-end PCs.

The 45nm process coupled with Intel's breakthrough Hafnium-based high-k metal gate (Hi-k) recipe will have it talking up how much smaller designs can be, how much more cost-effective and how much more energy-efficient.

And while Intel is about to strut its stuff, AMD is supposedly having some problems with its new 65nm process and that's why it reportedly won't be able to produce its highest-frequency 2.6GHz quad Phenom chip this year. At least that's what a story in DigiTimes said.

Apparently Taiwan motherboard makers only expect AMD to introduce 2.2GHz and 2.3GHz models at the November 19 launch and a 2.4GHz part in December. They are supposed to be competitively priced however.

Dual-core Penryns, however, are supposed to be good for 3.4GHz and the quads should do anywhere from 2GHz to 3.2GHz. They all reportedly use a front-side bus worth up to 1,600MHz. The quads can have 12MB of L2 cache, the dual-cores 6MB. Pricing reportedly runs from $177-$1,279, except for the sole Extreme which run $999 in quantity.

Mainstream, mobile and business-class Penryn aren't due until next year.

Anyway, HP claims its new workstations exhibit performance gains of up to 400% over its year-old quad-core Xeon boxes, with double-digit gains in productivity and a faster return on investment.

HP's new xw6600 and xw8600 are eight-core workstations using either quad-core 5400 or dual-core 5200 Penryns and should start shipping in mid-December, HP said, at prices starting at about $1,200.

The 8600 can expand to 128GB with storage capacity for 5TB; 32GB of DDR RAM and 3TB of storage for the 6600. The units are fitted with two second-generation PCI Express x16 slots.

The HP boxes will run XP, Vista or Red Hat.

Lenovo's also got two dual-socket machines called the ThinkStation D10 and S10, run by the 5400 and Core Extreme QX9650 respectively, that should be available in January starting at $1,739 and $1,199 again respectively.

They are the first new Think-branded boxes since IBM sold its PC unit, which thought up the name, to the Chinese two years ago.