Intel Stuffing More Than 8 Cores Into Westmere-EX
The more cores, the more hardcore.
Intel's octacore server chip, the Xeon 7500 Nehalem-EX, is built on the 45nm process. For the next big evolution of the Xeon line, Intel hopes to be pushing even more cores when it takes it flagship to the 32nm Westmere-EX generation.
While the Westmere 32nm technology is in the Xeon 5600, Intel plans to extend that technology to EX sometime next year.
Stephen Smith, vice president and director of PC client operations and enabling at Intel, said during a webcast speech that the upcoming Westmere-EX chips will be targeted at systems with four sockets or more. The good news is that the Westmere-EX chips will be socket compatible for those who have already invested in the latest Xeon servers.
"We are well along in development and we are confident that we have a product that will give us a great performance boost. It will go into the same sockets, so the idea here is the platform is an investment that the OEMs have made," said Smith, according to the IDG.
Although Intel didn't divulge any information on core counts or clock speeds, analysts see that hitting 12 cores (for 24 threads) is a likely possibility given that AMD already has its Magny-Cours product.

These are server chips right now. I don't think you will see to many of these at best buy.
It's the third word in the article, and it's double underlined.
I suggest the following strategy when making a comment: Read the article (or at least the first paragraph) (or at least the first sentence!) (or at least the beginning of the first sentence!!)
People read the comments to find out additional information, not to see how bad your reading comprehension is...
Would be awesome if those 12-core chips were in the $400 range. Then it would be doable to stuff two of them on a workstation motherboard without breaking the bank too much.
These are server chips right now. I don't think you will see to many of these at best buy.
Impressive and all, but is there really a large demand for for a 12 core chip? Or will Intel continue to rely on Dell & Best Buy to convince consumers they need multiple cores to multitask explorer and outlook?
thackstonns:
These are server chips right now. I don't think you will see to many of these at best buy.
It's truly amazing how people can miss the point so badly isn't it? But on another note. Your saying you don't buy your servers from best buy?
Seeing as how these are Xeon CPU's, I would say there is HUGE demand. If you can fit 12 cores in a single socket that used to house 4, or even 8, then you can drastically increase the capicity of your servers without drastically increasing the power consumption or rack space needed.
They also have single socket that is affordable board is $500, 12 core is $1200.
I plan on building one for 3d animation rendering station this summer.
It's the third word in the article, and it's double underlined.
I suggest the following strategy when making a comment: Read the article (or at least the first paragraph) (or at least the first sentence!) (or at least the beginning of the first sentence!!)
People read the comments to find out additional information, not to see how bad your reading comprehension is...
Power savings is nice, and as mentioned, the real use of these chips would be in server virtualization, and CPU-intensive task. I see the biggest advantage to this in the per-socket pricing (VMware being one) that you could save - at a few grand per socket, stuffing 12 cores on a CPU could be very nice.
While I personally know these are server chips and what they're used for, just wanted to say... Not double underlined on my computer. Not underlined at all. That's probably some randomly generated ad thing on your computer.
Our XenServer and VmWare servers need memory not cpu cores...I wish memory was cheaper...We can afford the dual 4 core CPUs but only 32 gig of ram...The CPUs barely click while ram gets eaten away.
It's double underlined on both IE and Opera, on two different machines, on my end.
Exactly. This little bugger being socket compatible with my existing nahelem xeons is going to make upgrading my VMWare cluster a real easy task, while adding over double the cpu count without the need of additional VMWare licenses. It wont matter how much this CPU is, if the clusters load continues to go the way it is, i'll upgrade them to this cpu even if they are 2500 a pop.
Do you even know what the word "server" means?