As rumoured by World of Apple, Intel has officially unveiled its high-end server and workstation processor.
The new chips will deliver 135-percent performance increase with up to 40-percent decreases in power consumption, the new "Woodcrest" processors are the first to take advantage of Core micro-architecture, a design said to include technologies to improve performance.
Intel will initially ship the Xeon 5100 series at speeds of up to 3.0GHz, the company said, which will pack a faster 1333MHz front side bus and 4 megabytes of shared L2 cache.
"Simply put, the Core microarchitecture is a technical marvel that is driving a new era of power efficiency without compromising on what can only be described as eye-popping dual-core 64-bit performance," said Pat Gelsinger.
The top-of-the-line 3.0GHz Xeon 5100 will ship with a thermal design point (TDP) of 80 watts with all others models rated at 65W. In the third quarter, Intel plans an even lower voltage version at 2.33 GHz with a TDP of just 40 watts.
Intel says it plans to unveil a 3.2GHz version of Woodcrest later this year.