The game of chasing the latest and fastest CPU is getting quite boring. What most of you guys know as Gulftown Core i7 980X Extreme in the enthusiast desktop market will get a different brand in the server market.

Intel calls this six-core CPU generation simply Westmere EP and the fastest CPU throughout 2010 will be Xeon X5680 clocked at 3.33GHz with massive 12MB of cache, six-cores and twelve threads support. Apart of the different socket, it is the same CPU as Core i7 980X but the server one will sell for even more than $999 [Ridiculous. -Ed.] price.

The CPU supports DDR3 800, 1066 and 1333MHz as well as Intel’s Turbo boost. It is quite interesting seeing how Intel now thinks that controller overclocking is OK even for servers. TDP is 130W, so nothing new there, as this is always Intel’s top TDP at least with this kind of product.

As we already said, this market segment won’t initially be replaced by Sandy Bridge in Q1 2011, as Sandy designs are only dual or quad core. We are quite sure that Intel is working hard on a brand new next generation 32nm architecture for servers and for more than four cores, but we are not aware of any specifics.