This has been chip week. AMD pushed out its well-anticipated Magny-Cours eight- and 12-core doohickeys, the first of their kind, giving AMD more cores than Intel and ostensibly the world’s fastest x86 chips. Then on Tuesday Intel pushed out the equally anticipated Nehalem-EX, its own personal best, crowning its Xeon line for the first time with eight cores that’s bound for systems that run anywhere from two to 256 chips (think 16TB of memory). The 45nm EX, now the Xeon 7500, is reputed to give the wildly popular Xeon line its biggest performance boost ever, something like 3x, along with 16-thread hyper-threading and a 4x increase in memory, which works out to up to a terabyte on a four-processor configuration. The dingus is also fitted out with a slew of mission-critical reliability features. The two companies can now argue over which is spiffier.

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