Intel has announced that Nehalem-based Xeon processors are on their way to servers worldwide.

You may be familiar with the desktop range of “Nehalem” Core i7 processors from Intel, which are extremely fast. Intel is attempting to bring this new burst of speed and technology breakthrough to servers by creating Xeon processors based on the Nehalem architecture.

The new Xeon chips will have a lot of advantages over current processors, most importantly and integrated memory controller (for that extra “oomph”) and hyper-threading that can simulate up to 16 cores. That’s right, 16. As well as a feature called Turbo Boost (which desktop enthusiasts should be familiar with), which overclocks the processor as needed.

Quite a few companies have already jumped on the bandwagon as eager early-adopters, including Dreamworks and IBM, who are implementing them in all new servers they are currently providing.

Importantly however, nobody is expecting Intel to cause an uproar and rapidly take over the market, as they did with their Core 2 Duo range a few years back. Reason? Intel already has a massive market share in the server environment. Ashok Kumar says,

“We expect only an incremental upside on a unit basis”