The new Xeon 7400 series features four- and six-core configurations designed to be used in systems with at least four processors and is targeted largely toward datacenters and, in particular, virtualization applications.

The new Xeon 7400 series, based on Intel's 45 nanometer high-k process (PDF), offers both performance improvements and improved energy efficiency, according to information released by Intel. With 16 MB of shared level-3 cache and clock speeds of 2.66 GHz, the 7400 series' performance improvements are up to 50 percent compared with previous-generation chips, according to Intel's literature.

A Dell PowerEdge R900 using four 7400s (24 processing cores) running VMware ESX server 3.5 scored a record VMmark result of 18.49. Additional performance data can be found here.

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