With AMD's 6-core Opterons taking the TOP500 supercomputer list by storm - the fastest system called Jaguar utilizing such chips, Intel has announced a little offensive for 2010 which will see to the release of new High Performance Computing (HPC) optimized Nehalem-EX processors.

Set to debut in the first half of next year, the HPC-ready hexa-cores will be clocked higher than the 8-core Nehalem-based Xeons and will provide customers with greater memory bandwidth and capacity compared to today's solutions. The 6-cores will be available in systems with up to 256 processors.

In addition to the new Nehalem-EX, Intel has also revealed that a beta program for its Ct technology will be available by the end of 2009. The Ct technology makes parallel programming in the C and C++ languages easier by automatically parallelizing code across multi-core and many-core processors