Intel’s “Nehalem EP” Xeon 5500 series of processors for two-socket servers were announced this afternoon. Finally. Now, the server market can breathe a sigh of relief and set about the difficult task of trying to peddle better boxes in a worsening economy. Which sure beats trying to sell last year’s machines this year.

Today, in Santa Clara, California, Intel general manager Pat Gelsinger characterized the launch of the Xeon 5500 chips and their related chipset, the “Tylersburg” 5520, as the most important server chip launch since the Pentium Pro was introduced back in 1995. Back then, Gelsinger explained, the Pentium Pro was the first x86 chip that had native multiprocessing capability built into it. (Some niche server vendors back then had created their own chipsets to glue multiple Pentium chips together to make SMP servers, of course, but Gelsinger didn’t mention that). It was also the first Intel chip to feature out-of-order execution, a nifty technology that had been experimented with on RISC and other processors to boost performance.

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