"Westmere is going to let the [Nehalem] architecture be much more broadly used," McCarron said. The process shrink lowers the cost of production for Intel, which could help push the chip design to inexpensive systems, he said.

Intel revamped its chip road map in February, saying it would move to a 32-nanometer process more quickly than it had originally planned. The company would spend $7 billion over the next two years to revamp manufacturing plants in order to reduce manufacturing costs while increasing production.

Intel may also focus on the Larrabee chip during the show, McCarron said. Larrabee will include many cores and combine processing capabilities of graphics processing units with the x86 architecture, improving application and graphics performance. The chip -- being called a graphics processor -- is targeted at the gaming market and industries that require high-end parallel processing and graphics power, like oil and gas exploration..

"This will probably be the last IDF till Larrabee launches," McCarron said. Intel has said it would ship Larrabee in early 2010.