Intel this afternoon sought to cement its grip on the very high end of computers with its first eight-core processor, the Xeon 7500. The two extra cores give it even more performance in highly parallel situations -- up to 16 program threads at once with Hyperthreading -- and the design itself is unique at Intel in the sheer amount of scaling compared to the outgoing 7400. A four-processor server can handle as much as 1TB of memory, and a single computer can include as many as 256 discrete processors.
