Chip manufacturer Intel is rumored to gear up for the premature introduction of its Nehalem-based processors. World's first x86 processor manufacturer has to rush things up mainly because Advanced Micro Devices makes significant leaps on the dual-processor market with the advent of the B3-stepped Opterons.

Intel's 45-nanometer server technology has hit the market back in November last year, but the chip manufacturer learned its lesson from the Pentium 4 era: never let your rival any advantage. The recently published diagrams on the VR-Zone website show that the first processors for the 2-way servers are slated for release during the third quarter of 2008. The Nehalems and their shiny Socket 1366 will initially come in faint amounts, but the shipped quantities are expected to grow to about 8% during the last quarter of 2008.

The Nehalem micro-architecture is brand-new and offers a more efficient and powerful processor as compared to Intel's technology used in the Intel Core 2 family. The most important feature of the upcoming chips is their ability to support multiple threads per core, which will practically double the number of available processor cores.

The Nehalem chips will also replace the older Front Side Bus with the more powerful Quick Path Interconnect technology to accompany the processor's new integrated memory controller. The processor's design appears to be more customizable, which could allow the chip manufacturer to implement a graphics core or even to change the number of operating processing engines.

Intel aims to achieve more than market share with this premature release. The Nehalems not only will strengthen Intel's position on the processor market, but they will also shift the general attention from AMD's upcoming 45-nanometer processors, slated to arrive at the same time.

Intel refused to comment on the news, as part of the company's policy not to comment on rumors.