Intel Stuffing More Than 8 Cores Into Westmere-EX

The more cores, the more hardcore.

Intel's octacore server chip, the Xeon 7500 Nehalem-EX, is built on the 45nm process. For the next big evolution of the Xeon line, Intel hopes to be pushing even more cores when it takes it flagship to the 32nm Westmere-EX generation.

While the Westmere 32nm technology is in the Xeon 5600, Intel plans to extend that technology to EX sometime next year.

Stephen Smith, vice president and director of PC client operations and enabling at Intel, said during a webcast speech that the upcoming Westmere-EX chips will be targeted at systems with four sockets or more. The good news is that the Westmere-EX chips will be socket compatible for those who have already invested in the latest Xeon servers.

"We are well along in development and we are confident that we have a product that will give us a great performance boost. It will go into the same sockets, so the idea here is the platform is an investment that the OEMs have made," said Smith, according to the IDG.

Although Intel didn't divulge any information on core counts or clock speeds, analysts see that hitting 12 cores (for 24 threads) is a likely possibility given that AMD already has its Magny-Cours product.

WB Expands DVD to Blu-ray Upgrade Program

Warner Bros. is expanding its DVD2Blu program and lowering prices to boot.

Warner Brothers is expanding the company's DVD trade-in program that allows consumers to trade in standard definition movies and pay $10 to upgrade to the Blu-ray version of the same movie.

Announced in November, Warner's DVD2Blu program made things easier for folks looking to upgrade their existing DVD library to Blu-ray by offering them cheap rates for movies they already own. When it first began, the program had just 55 titles, but this week, Warner is expanding the approved list of movies to 85. It's still not huge, but hey, an extra 30 movies is an extra 30 movies, right?

Aside from the small bump in titles, WB is also lowering the cost of some upgrades. When the program started late last year, titles cost between $8 and $10 (along with the original copy of the movie). Now, the prices listed go as low as $5 (plus original copy) and the most expensive is $7.

In case you're wondering, the disks and packaging sent to WB are processed and used for future packaging.