Intel plans to star selling Nehalem based Xeon processors on what seems to be the last Sunday of Q1 2009. Xeon W 55xx, Xeon X 55xx, Xeon L 55xx and Xeon E 55xx versions will start selling as of March 29th, and you can expect them available as of March 30th, the first working day of that week. They are all Nehalem based of Nehalem EX to be precise, as we do talk about server CPUs.

The top dog Xeon quad core W5580 works at 3.2GHz has 8MB of cache and 6.4GB/s QPI. It comes in LGA1366 packaging and it will sell for $1557, while every other SKU will be cheaper. The runner up Xeon X5570 clocked at 2.93GHz will sell for $1349 and launches the same day.

These are, of course, the wholesale prices and if you don’t buy many of them, you will end up paying even more for them in etail / retail. An interesting part is that Intel will be selling the cooling solution for these CPUs separately, which was never the case before.