VRM11.0 not necessarily need 12 phase voltage. Penryn, IMHO, just a 45nm proc with SSE4 and added cache. is't? if clockspeed start from 3Ghz, i'm going to get it lol

"Motherboard developers will have to make some minor changes to support [Penryn]. We can't guarantee that a person could just plug the chip into every motherboard on the market today."

taken from dailytech

this will hurt intel's sales a bit, ppl are reluctant to change a new mobo just to get a new cpu than just getting a new cpu and plug in on their existing mobo. and this will further hurt intel's sales if K10 perform as what amd claim. by changing to a new mobo and cpu, ppl might just opt for better performing platform.

45 nm (Penryn) processors: Penryn processors use the current VRM 11.0. So in principle any motherboard supporting FSB 1333 processors should support Penryn processors too with BIOS updates. In fact all the P35/G33 motherboards and all the nForce 600i Series motherboards (according to NVIDIA) supports them. However it is unclear if P965/975X/945GC motherboards support them.

It needs to be VRM 11.0 compliant, which is key when it comes to 45-nm processor support. Let me say that the problem isn't decreasing voltage levels, but strong power fluctuation due to millions of transistors clocking up and down, or switching on and off. Remember that future quad-core processors will be able to dynamically adjust clock speeds for each core individually, and switch cores on and off depending on the workload.

This also means that any 965 motherboard that is VRM 11 compliant can technically support 45-nm processors. VRM 11 says that the circuit is programmed using 8-bit voltage IDs (VID), allowing for 0.00625 V voltage increments. The minimum operating voltage isn't 0.8375 V (as in VRM 10), but goes down all the way to 0.5 V. VRM 11 also comes with the option to share the load across more phases, and the circuit runs so-called dual edge modulation, which means that the controllers send multiple impulses to the transistors while using smaller capacitors. The goal isn't just to provide smaller voltage increments and less voltage for the 45-nm processor generation, but also to provide sufficient power at voltage levels that may switch frequently. This can be done by specifying tight slew rates.