The chip also boasts some chip enhancements for Intel. This is the first time Intel will integrate the PCI-Express bus in the microprocessor, Skaugen said. That will improve data throughput inside servers while saving power.

Intel did not share further details about the E5 chip such as clock speed, cache or backward socket compatibility. Further details about the chip will come at a later date, an Intel spokesman said.

Skaugen also reiterated the company's commitment to the Itanium chip, saying it will be able to co-exist with Xeon chips, and the difference between the two was mainly about operating systems.

Xeon and Itanium chips have many common error-correction and RAS (reliability, availability and serviceability) features demanded by high-end servers, but are based on different architectures. Itanium is designed for mainframe operating systems and Unix flavors such as Hewlett-Packard's HP-UX, while Xeon chips could work with Windows, Linux and Sun's SPARC environments, Skaugen said.

"There's no workload in the world that cannot run on Xeon processors," Skaugen said.