Intel said to be preparing eight-core Xeon for launch next month

Nothing's official just yet, but Macworld is reporting that Intel will be rolling out an eight-core Xeon processor at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco next month, marking the company's first foray into octa-core processors, and paving the way for 16-core systems using two of the chips. Unfortunately, there aren't many more details than that, with the only other word being that it'll be a 16-thread processor, and be manufactured using a 45-nanometer process. As Macworld notes, however, it does seem likely that the processor in question is the Nehalem-EP seen on the roadmap above, which is based on the Tylersburg platform -- the first product of Intel's throw-a-dart-at-a-map naming scheme.