Reuters is reporting that Intel is already sampling 45nm chips and that the chips are on track to be released late in 2007. The chips are samples of Intel's upcoming Penryn core, which is a die-shrunk version of the existing Core architecture. Intel's Process Architecture and Integration Director Mark Bohr says the first Penryn chips are still on track make their debut in the second half of next year, just as Intel announced at IDF a couple of months ago. Going by rumors that have appeared since then, Penryn chips will show up in the third quarter of 2007 in both dual- and quad-core variants with clock speeds going up to 4.0GHz and cache sizes as large as 12MB.