MacRumors.com

The International Solid State Circuits Conference takes places this week, and reveals Intel's plans for a dual-core Xeon server processor due in the "second half of the year".

The upcoming chip is called "Tulsa" and has an emphasis on performance. The dual-core chip is expected to come in at 3.4GHz with a 16MB unified cache. The performance is expected to boosted by up to 10% with this change. Also featured in the chip is Intel's virtualization technology allowing the chip to run multiple operating systems as well as energy conservation technology.

Apple announced at MacWorld San Francisco that they would be transitioning their entire line over to the Intel processor in 2006, suggesting that the Tulsa processor could find its way into future Xserves.

Meanwhile, IBM continues work on their Power6 processor also designed for servers. We had previously been interested in the Power6 as a basis for future PowerPC chips.