Intel on Wednesday confirmed that it would ship the six-core Xeon processor in the second half of this year, putting to rest rumors about the processor's actual ship date.

Speculation about the shipping date of the processor, code-named Dunnington, surfaced last month after an Intel presentation detailing the processor was leaked by Sun Microsystems. The presentation, which showed that the chip would ship in the second half, was available on Sun's servers, but was later pulled off.

The Dunnington chip will be part of Intel's Xeon MP 7000 series of processors and will allow a four-processor server to have up to 24 cores, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said during a speech at Intel's investor conference in Santa Clara, California, on Wednesday. It will be part of the Caneland server platform, which also includes the Clarksboro chipset.

Otellini also reaffirmed that Intel was on schedule to release chips based on the Nehalem microarchitecture, a successor to Intel's Core microarchitecture, later this year. Otellini in the past said that Nehalem would deliver better performance-per-watt and better system performance through its QuickPath Interconnect system architecture. Nehalem chips will also include an integrated memory controller and improved communication links between system components, Otellini said.

Nehalem processors will include multithreading and up to eight cores per chip, Otellini said. A multithreaded octo-core system will make for a very powerful machine and could expand Intel's presence in niche segments like high-performance computing (HPC), he said. The PC version of the Nehalem chip will mix CPU cores and graphics cores to deliver improved system performance, Otellini said. Nehalem chips will be manufactured using the 45-nanometer process.

The company will follow up Nehalem with the Westmere microarchitecture in 2009 and Sandy Bridge in 2010, Otellini said. Otellini indicated that work has begun on microarchitectures to succeed Sandy Bridge, but that code-names had not been assigned. By 2011, he said chips will be manufactured using the 22-nm process.

Intel will make a real leap into the HPC segment with the Larrabee platform, which will have lots of cores, lots of threads and deliver performance "bar none," Otellini said. The platform will be delivered in the late-2009-to-2010 time frame, Otellini said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.