Intel Sells over 100,000 Six-Core Chips

Any uncertainty regarding the availability of Intel's six-core microprocessors can now be considered obsolete if the most recent reports concerning shipments of Xeon and Gulftown chips prove accurate. The Santa Clara chip giant's consumer-oriented hexacore processor was reviewed just days ago and the Xeon 5600 series debuted even more recently. This may have left some space for wondering whether initial availability would be capable of meeting demand. Now, BusinessWeek seems to suggest that the chips' availability will, in fact, be quite broad.

Both the Xeon 5600-series chips and the Intel Core i7-980X are based on the Westmere micro-architecture and are built using the 32nm manufacturing process technology. The first thing noticed by end-users will likely be the extra processing power that extra cores enable, but this is just part of the benefits brought by the new chips.

The real asset of Intel's newest processing units is their ability to more quickly and easily handle encryption and decryption of more secure transactions and virtualized environments. This capability is provided by the Intel AES-NI (Intel advanced encryption standard new instructions) and Intel trusted execution technology (Intel TXT).

“The Intel Xeon Processor 5600 series will be the backbone of mainstream computing environments. New security capabilities will boost the confidence of IT managers. Improvements in performance, server virtualization and power consumption will foster productivity and efficiency for a broad range of applications ranging from data transactions to workstations performing medical imaging and digital prototyping,” Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of the Intel architecture group, said.

According to a report by BusinessWeek, Intel has already shipped over 100,000 Westmere-based six-core CPUs. Servers and workstations with Xeon 5600 or Gulftown chips at their core will soon be launched by HP, IBM, Oracle, SGI, Fujtisu, Dell, Cray and Cisco, among others.