The company's new Xeon chips will be based on the upcoming Ivy Bridge microarchitecture and initially will be aimed at the emerging category of microservers, Intel said. Microservers are low-power servers with shared components designed mainly for Web serving and cloud applications.

The new chips will replace existing Xeon E3 chips, which are based on the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture. Intel introduced the E3 chips in March last year to jump-start the microserver category, which is still in its infancy but expected to grow along with Web and cloud activity in data centers.

Intel currently dominates the data center, and the company's chips are used in a majority of servers that ship today. But Intel has been putting more resources behind microservers as a low-power alternative to traditional racks, blades and towers, which handle more intense workloads such as databases.

The new Xeon microserver chips will outperform their predecessors while drawing the same amount of power, the company said. The driving factors include 3D transistors, which are part of Intel's new 22-nanometer manufacturing process. Intel has claimed that 3D transistors will consume a little less than half the power and be 37 percent faster than Intel's existing 32-nm process chips, which have 2D transistors. The 3D transistor technology, called tri-gate transistors, replaces a flat, two-dimensional arrangement of transistors with a 3D structure that rises up from the silicon substrate.

Enthusiast website Anandtech with Ivy Bridge compared with Sandy Bridge.