Intel is joined by IBM in this first public briefing on the new Intel Xeon processor codenamed "Nehalem-EX," set for production in the second half of 2009. The processor will be at the heart of the next generation of intelligent and expandable high-end Intel server platforms, and will feature up to eight cores inside a single chip supporting 16 threads and 24Mb of cache. The processors will feature 2.3 billion transistors built using Intel's 45nm high-K metal gate technology, and will bring significant performance increase compared with a previous generation of Xeon processor.