Intel chief executive Paul Otellini announced at the Intel Q1 2009 earning’s call that over 1 million Nehalem processors have been shipped worldwide since their first inception in November 2008. Otellini also announced that the the new 32nm “Westmere” processors will be available “earlier than expected”.

Paul Otellini claimed that the milestone was reached thanks to the introduction of it’s brand new Nehalem-based Xeon 5500 server processors, which made up for around 50% of the 1 million Core i7 / Nehalem based chips:

“the real interesting is what happens on the dual-processor server product. About half the volume that I referenced was in servers, about half of it was in the desktop machine.”

This comes as great news, considering Intel has been feverishly reducing its workforce in an attempt to curb expenses.

Other great news for OEMs and customers is the unexpected announcement that Intel’s 32nm processors (and Nehalem’s successor), codenamed “Westmere” are expected to ship early, or more precisely in Q4 2009:

“We have pulled in Westmere, our fist 32-nanometer product family, and will now be shipping those products later this year,”

said Otellini at the event.

This caused a bit of confusion however. Intel announced that the Westmere chips will be shipped in Q4 2009, but when asked about an official introduction / launch, Intel maintained the notion that that is a completely different story – yet the Westmere chips are slated for a 2009 introduction – leaving everybody a little confused.

Minor announcements from the event include an update on Intel’s Larrabee GPU, which should be ready in 2010 and is currently in debugging.