Less than two months after Intel released its Nehalem Xeon 5500 processor, the company Tuesday previewed its new Nehalem-EX Xeon 7400 processor. However, the critical elements of the new chip, its official product name, its clock speed and its cost have still been kept under the wraps by the company.

Leading server vendors - including Apple, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM, Intel, SGI and Sun - have since introduced servers featuring the new processor.

While the Nehalem-EX, accomplished with 8 cores and 16 threads, will materialize in servers with up to 8 processor sockets; a fully occupied Nehalem-EX server will include the capability of 64 cores and up to 128 threads. The processor will have 24MB of shared cache, and four high-speed QPI links. In addition, it would include "Turbo Boost" and Hyper-threading technologies.

Noting that the capacities of the Nehalem-EX would offer tremendous performance, Kennedy Brown, Xeon MP product manager at Intel, said that the new processor will help build up the market for bigger, higher-end servers.

Brown said: "All of the goodness you saw launched with the Nehalem Xeon 5500 in the energy efficient performance server segment will be coming to the expandable segment, which is the higher-end segment that is based on servers with four sockets and above and with lots of memory."