The most important computer processor manufacturing company in the world, Intel, announced that it will soon officially launch a new line of Xeon processors designed for high end servers running in multiple socket environments. This move comes just in time as an attempt to block AMD's own line of quad core central processing units.

Codenamed Tigerton those new Intel processors will form the Xeon 7300 lineup and they will be the very first CPUs designed for use in servers with four or more processors, replacing the current line for multi processor environments which has only two cores. According to the news site computerworld computerworld which is citing Adesh Gupta, regional platform architecture manager at Intel Asia-Pacific's Server Platforms Group, the new central processing units will offer much better performance when compared to the current generation, the Xeon 5300 chips. "Across the spectrum of different applications, we're seeing really, really good performance," Gupta said.

The 7300 lineup is part of the incoming Caneland package which includes the new Intel 7300 chipset also known as Clarksboro that is hoped will boost data transferring speeds as it features four 1066MHz individual pathways between a processor and the main system memory. As AMD is expected to launch a generation of processors designed for use in servers and because they are expected to outperform all previous designs, Intel is hurrying its Caneland line of products, hoping to keep as much of the server market as possible. There will be sic versions of Tigerton processors initially with the X7350 as the top of the line as it runs at a frequency of 2.93HHz and it comes with 8MB of cache memory and a TDP value of 130W. Lower 80W TDP processors are also available, like the E7340 CPU which runs at 2.4GHz and comes with 8MB of cache memory while the E7330 also runs at 2.4GHz, but has 6M bytes of cache. The entry level processors from the Caneland package are the E7320 and E7310 models and they both come with a mere 4MB of cache memory and running frequencies of 2.13GHz and 1.6GHz, respectively.

A low power and low energy consumption version will also be made available under the name of L7345 and this processing unit will run at 1.86GHz while having 8MB of cache memory and a TDP rating of only 50W. While the new line of Xeon processors may offer a significant performance boost over the previous versions, that boost does not come cheaply as Intel priced those units at a starting price of $856, while the maximum price tag tops at around $2,301.