The world’s largest chipmaker Intel Corp on Tuesday unveiled its most powerful six core microprocessor designed and developed at its India development centre.

The 45-nanometre chip boasts of a whopping 1.9 billion transistors, six processing cores and 16MB of shared cache memory in the Xeon family. The most powerful chip in the 45 nanometre space has been designed, developed, tested and validated in Bangalore facility by the Indian team in a record two years, Intel India president, Praveen Vishakantaiah told reporters at a preview of the made-in-India product.

The Xeon server processor on which a host of applications can be built for virtualised environments and data-demanding workloads such as databases, business intelligence and enterprise resource planning (ERP) enhances performance by 50 per cent, consuming much less power than its earlier versions - quad core and dual core processors.

Platforms based on this enterprise chip can be scaled up to 16 processor sockets to deliver servers with 96 processing cores inside, offering scalability, ample computing threads, extensive memory resources and reliability for enterprise data centres, Vishakantaiah said.

Intel has released seven 45 nanometre manufactured Xeon processor 7400 series products to about 50 global vendors (OEMs) such as Dell, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, HP, NEC and Unisys and Indian vendors like HCL and Wipro for deployment in high-end enterprise servers.

End products with the new chip will hit the market worldwide in a week.
The price of sequence processors range from $ 856-2729 for 1000 chips and can be deployed in the servers and CPUs (central processing units) of quad core or dual core versions.

The new chip helps IT infrastructure to manage complex enterprise server environments, enhance performance of multi-thread applications. With new features such as additional cores, large shared caches and advanced virtualisation technologies, Intel South Asia sales director, R Ravichandran said.

Products with the new processor offer frequencies up to 2.66 GHz and consume just 11 watt power for each core, which is 50 watt less than quad core processors.

Codenamed Dunnington, Intels first six-core 86 microprocessor was designed and developed two months ahead of its delivery schedule.

Intel India, set up a decade ago with over $ 1.7 billion investment, has also contributed to the development of Intel products such as Napa, Santa Rosa and Montevina mobile platforms, besides quad-core processors. It employs about 2,500 engineers.