By Nebojsa Novakovic, The Inquirer
THERE HASN’T BEEN anything really new on the high end CPU front for a while, but that’s all set to change this month.

It’s been nearly a year since Intel’s latest speed update on its high-end desktop, workstation and server CPUs from the Nehalem tribe, while AMD surely hasn’t been any better, since the six-core Istanbuls still languish in the below 3GHz realm.

However, March will bring a bumper harvest for the performance afficionados, whether you’re looking to upgrade your super desktop, set up new workstations or add many cores to your server farm. And, we’re talking about both CPU vendors here, for the first time in a long while during the same month.

Intel’s focus, of course, will be on unveiling its 32nm six-core range based on the Gulftown chip. The first half of March should see announcement of the high-end desktop entry, the 3.33GHz Core i7-980X, followed by the similar speed top bin dual socket Xeon 5600 series varieties. These should overclock just as well, if not better, than their quad-core predecessors in the same socket, yet will add half again more cores and cache within the same TDP. And, oh yes, those AEC crypto instructions, too.

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