Whilst Intel's Core i7 processor family is showing to be a dominant force today, there's an even bigger series of monsters ready to be unleashed which are also based off the Nehalem architecture.

However, these are enterprise level processors which will be released under Xeon branding. But what's particularly impressive about them is that at the premium end they will be an octo-core arrangement (that's right, eight cores on one CPU).

Some other known details of these chips include a transistor count of some 2.3 billion, 24mb of L3 cache, quad-channel memory interface and QPI. They will be built using Intel's current 45nm manu process and are primarily aimed toward quad-socket server platforms (meaning a whopping 32 cores in one system).

we will hear a lot more about them from Intel when they attend the Solid State Circuits in San Fransisco between Feb 8 and 12.