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On the eve of AMD delivering Istanbul, its first six-core chip, months ahead of schedule, Intel did a bit of thunder-stealing and started talking up its coming eight-core MP chip, the Nehalem-EX, which won't be available in systems until early next year.

That's around the time AMD is supposed to start shipping a 45nm Opteron part called Magny-Cours with eight to 12 cores, figuring that OEMs could have 2P and 4P systems out in the first half of next year.

Intel is shooting for bigger game than Istanbul. It wants the 45nm EX to take a big bite out of the small but profitable RISC market, where Sparc and Power live, even if it cannibalizes some of Intel's own high-end Itanium business in the process.

Intel brought IBM along to the preview Tuesday to say that it'll be selling eight- and 16-socket "eX5" systems built out of the Nehalem-EX around this time next year. IBM is apparently one of 15 eight-sockets-and-above design-wins that Intel has gotten so far from eight OEMs for the chip.

Intel already claims RISC migrations to its first quad-core MP Xeon, the 7300, as well as its first six-core Xeon, the 7400, citing accounts such as Aviza, BMW, Lockheed Martin and VeriSign.

It claims a major industry shift to x86 systems above four sockets and figures the EX will simply expand its addressable market.

To push the shift, Nehalem-EX borrows RAS features from its cousin, Itanium, such as Machine Check Architecture (MCA) Recovery, which will ensure that data errors are fixed without restarting the system.

It says the facility is particularly important in virtualized systems. All the live VMs won't have to be migrated to fix a rare but confounding error on the CPU, memory or I/O in one of them.

The feature requires negotiations with the operating system or virtualization software and Microsoft, Red Hat, Novell and VMware have signed up to enable it.

Intel, meanwhile, has delayed its next-generation Itanium chip Tukwila by maybe nine months to enhance its application scalability so it can reportedly capture at least one very large high-end Sparc server customer looking to bolt because Sun is getting sold.

Intel's using the Nehalem and Itanium like a pincher to squeeze the RISC market.

The Nehalem-EX is advertised as "the greatest Xeon performance leap in history."

Compared to the company's current top-of-the-line part, the six-core Xeon 7400 that it delivered in September with an old, slow front-side bus, the EX is supposed to deliver 9x the memory bandwidth and better than 2.5x the database performance, 1.7x the integer throughput and 2.2x the floating point.

The single EX chip will support 16 threads with Hyper-Threading and 24MB of L3 cache, all more than Dunnington.

It will also double memory capacity with up to 16 memory slots per processor socket and offer four high-bandwidth chip-to-chip QuickPath Interconnect links.

Like the existing Nehalem EP, aka the Xeon 5500, which is limited to two sockets, the EX offers Turbo Boost so users can tinker with the clock speeds of individual cores. Otherwise Intel wouldn't talk clock speeds.

Nehalem-EX will be able to produce large-memory two-socket through eight-socket systems capable of processing 128 threads simultaneously without third-party chips to glue the platform together.

Greater socket counts like, say, 32, will come with third-party chipsets like IBM's eX, which already lets it go to 16 sockets with Dunnington.

Server platforms group marketing general manager Boyd Davis said Intel will keep pushing the Xeon. Itanium, despite continued poaching, is expected to continue on the strength of the Unix, OpenVMS and NonStop software that runs on the thing.

Nehalem-EX is supposed to go into production later this year.