Despite of tough economic environment, sales of expensive desktops as well as workstations remain on high level, according to Intel Corp., whose chief executive officer said that shipments of central processing units (CPUs) featuring Nehalem micro-architecture have almost reached a milestone of one million units shipped.

“If you combine Intel Core i7 and Intel Xeon 5500-series processors, this week Intel expects to ship its one millionth Nehalem-based microprocessor, demonstrating that the market still responds to the best performing products. […] It’s in very good volume now for that segment of the market, although it is a fairly high-end segment of the market,” said Paul Otellini, chief executive officer and president of Intel, during a conference call with financial analysts.

Intel Nehalem processors bring a number of important innovations to the company’s desktop and server platforms. The new chips sport built-in memory controllers, utilize new processor bus, new cache sub-system, SSE4.2 instructions, new micro-architecture and so on. It is also important that the Nehalem processors’ design allows integration of both general-purpose x86 cores as well as graphics processing engines.

According to Mr. Otellini, Intel is already shipping its next-generation code-named Westmere processors to its customers. Westmere chips are the second iteration of Nehalem micro-architecture.

“We have shipped thousands of Westmere samples to over 30 OEM customers already,” the head of Intel told analysts.

On the 19th of April Intel reported first-quarter revenue of $7.1 billion, down 26% annually and 13% sequentially; operating income of $670 million; net income of $647 million, a 55% decrease year-over-year, but a 176% increase quarter over quarter and earnings per share (EPS) of 11 cents.

“We believe PC sales bottomed out during the first quarter and that the industry is returning to normal seasonal patterns. Intel has adapted well to the current economic environment and we're benefiting from disciplined execution and agility.We're delivering a product portfolio that meets the needs of the changing market, spanning affordable computing to high-performance, energy-efficient computing,” said Paul Otellini.

Tags: Intel, Nehalem, Westmere, Core