Intel Launches Eight Core, 16 Thread Nehalem-EX

In the enthusiast space for Intel fans, Gulftown may have just arrived with its hexacore power, but the world's largest chipmaker has a special new product for the server space.

Intel today launched the Xeon 7500 processor series, which offers up to eight cores packed in a single chip that's able to handle 16 threads at once. Systems can include up to 256 chips per server to combine for 2,048 cores and 4,098 threads.

"The Xeon 7500 brings mission critical capabilities to the mainstream by delivering the most significant leap in performance, scalability and reliability ever seen from Intel," said Kirk Skaugen, vice president of the Intel architecture group and general manager of Intel's data center group. "This combination will help users push to new levels of productivity, and accelerate the industry's migration away from proprietary architectures. We are democratizing high-end computing."