Adding error correction to the Xeon line will be useful as workloads get more complex and use more memory, Davis said. It may also be helpful as workloads are spread across virtual machines in data centers. Data corruption in one virtual machine can spread to other VMs and cause a server to crash, Davis said. Nehalem EX will be able to isolate an error and restart individual virtual machines without crashing an entire system, he said.

The Nehalem EX chips will be the first x86 server chips to include such error correction features, Davis said. Intel is sampling the chips to server makers, and systems powered by them will begin shipping early next year, Davis said. Intel won't say yet what clockspeeds the chips will run at.

IBM displayed an eight-socket server at Tuesday's press event with 64 cores running 128 software threads simultaneously.

Intel is targeting the EX processors at high-end systems running data-intensive applications such as databases. The chips are built on the Nehalem microarchitecture, which improves system speed by cutting data bottlenecks that plagued Intel's earlier chips. Intel's existing Xeon 5500 quad-core chips, which launched in March, are also based on Nehalem.

Along with error correction, servers based on Nehalem EX will include separate buffered memory chips that can temporarily store data alongside the main memory for faster execution.