Intel Corp. this week formally announced availability of six-core microprocessors for desktops as well as servers and/or workstations. The company reportedly indicated that it had shipped more than one hundred thousand of Intel Xeon 5600-series chips with six cores, which means that availability of the processors will be pretty broad.

The new Intel Xeon 5600-series and Intel Core i7-980X central processing units (CPUs) are based on the code-named Westmere micro-architecture (an updated version of Nehalem) and are made using 32nm fabrication technology. The new processors deliver two new security features – Intel advanced encryption standard new instructions (Intel AES-NI), and Intel trusted execution technology (Intel TXT) – that enable faster encryption and decryption performance for more secure transactions and virtualized environments, providing data centers with a stronger foundation for cloud security.

“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,” said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of the Intel architecture group.

In addition to launching new six-core microprocessors based on Westmere micro-architecture, Intel also released several new chips powered by previous-generation Nehalem micro-architecture and made using 45nm fabrication process and a number of quad-core CPUs based on Westmere design. In total, Intel released twelve 32nm Xeon 5600-series chips, five of which sport six processing engines and seven of which are quad-core products.

Starting today and continuing over the next 45 days, server and workstation systems based on the Intel Xeon processor 5600-series are expected to be announced by a wide variety of system manufacturers around the world, including Cisco, Cray, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Oracle and SGI.

Tags: Intel, Westmere, Gulftown, 32nm, Core