Chip giant Intel’s Tuesday launch of new Westmere-class series’ quad-core and six-core Xeon 5600 chips brings more cores to the company’s mainstream server market – more so with an accompanying introduction of new servers based on the chip from HP, Dell, and IBM.

In addition, Intel partners attending the Intel Solutions Summit (ISS) in Las Vegas this week also noted that the introduction of the new six-core Xeon 5600 series – called Westmere-EP – also underscores “easy” upgrade opportunities.

Noting that the proposed replacement of the new six-core Xeon 5600 series with last year’s quad-core Xeon 5500 series chips would result in an “automatic” increase in performance, Todd Swank, Marketing Director at Burnsville, Minn.-based system builder Nor-Tech, said that the performance boost would be almost “30 percent.”

While Swank said that “With just a BIOS upgrade needed, it makes it easy to upgrade our current Intel server offerings;” Michael Faye, VP of sales and marketing at Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Colfax International termed the Westmere upgrade “real smooth sailing.”

The four- and six-core versions of the Westmere-EP - which is basically the server and workstation version of Intel’s last-week-released 32nm desktop chip ‘Gulftown’ - will respectively support 8 and 12 threads.

The six-core version of the new chips can run up to 3.33 GHz; and underline the potential for bringing six-core computing to a much wider group of server users than ever before.