Chipzilla has been providing more details on its upcoming 15-core Xeon chip code-named Ivytown. Apparently Ivytown, which has 4.31 billion transistors and will go into high-end servers, will be part of the Xeon E7 chip lineup. The chip will likely be announced next week. Further details of the Ivytown were shared Monday at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

Ivytown will likely be Chipzilla’s fastest performing server chip. Ivytown will be based on Intel’s microarchitecture code-named Ivy Bridge, which was introduced last year. The Ivytown chips will replace the Xeon E7 chips based on Sandy Bridge architecture that were introduced last year.

The 15-core chip will go into 4- to 8-socket servers, which handle high-end computing tasks such as databases. Ivytown will run at frequencies ranging from 1.4GHz to 3.8GHz, and draw between 40 watts to 150 watts of power. Each core will support multithreading. Having 15 cores is a bit weird. Chips usually have either 8, 12 or 16 cores. The cores are arranged across three columns, and the chip has 40 PCI-Express 3.0 lanes.

AMD has a 16 core chip in the form of its latest Opteron 6300 parts. AMD’s first 16-core x86 Opteron chips code-named Interlagos shipped in 2011, but the company has not added any more for ages..