The processors, due out in December, are aimed at applications such as ultra-dense blades, IPTV, VoIP, network-attached storage (NAS) and storage area networks (SAN).

in April.

The new Jasper Forest processors are capable of configuring storage as a RAID 5 or 6, protecting against single or dual disk failure, respectively.

"Nehalem cores are quite powerful, but customers still want to be able to offload storage functions to a core, especially when you get down into two-core and single core versions of processors, really simplifies the architecture," said Seth Bobroff, general manager of Intel s Server Platforms Group.

Intel said the enhanced processor lowers system power consumption by 27 watts when compared to the Intel Xeon 5500 series and it integrates two Jasper Forest processors with 16 PCIe Generation 2.0 lanes each and is paired with the Intel 3420 chipset platform controller hub. This integration of the I/O hub via PCIe enables significant power and space savings, resulting in one of the highest performance-per-watt Intel Xeon chips ever.