Servers manufacturers are always looking to boost performance, and thousands of cores are being added to supercomputers in the high-performance computing space to do complex math calculations, McCarron said.

AMD's 12-core chip will provide good boost in performance over Intel's Westmere-EP chips as it has more computing resources at work, said Nathan Brookwood, principal analyst at Insight 64. However, the real battle will be between AMD's 12-core Magny-Cours and Intel's eight-core Nehalem-EX chip, which are both targeted at four-socket servers.

However, Intel insisted it won't launch a competition or offer prizes to drum up attention behind its chips.

"We don't need a contest to figure out what our customers are going to do with our products," said Shannon Poulin, Xeon platform director at Intel.

Users care less about cores than they do about price and performance-per-watt, Poulin said. An excessive number of cores could add to the software licensing costs for customers, Poulin said.