Intel: New Nehalem chip has "dramatic" performance gains

Intel said today that it will start producing a new, more powerful Xeon processor, called Nehalem-EX, later this year. The chip will feature eight cores and will support 16 threads and 24 MB of cache. In a statement, the company called the increased performance "dramatic, posting the highest-ever jump from a previous generation processor."

The company said it will offer up to nine times the memory bandwidth of the previous generation and double the memory capacity. It said the chip is ideal fort server consolidation, virtualized applications, data-heavy business apps and technical computing environments. The company said:

Nehalem-EX will provide tremendous scalability, from large-memory two-socket systems through eight-socket systems capable of processing 128 threads simultaneously without the need for third-party chips to "glue" the platform together. Additional scalability options including greater sockets counts will be possible with third-party solutions.

In a related announcement, IBM said today that it has a high-end server in the works that uses eight of the Intel Nehalem-EX chips and can handle 128 threads, according to a CNET report.