As Intel launched its much-anticipated Nehalem EP (Xeon 5500) server chip, Rick Jacobsen, director of financial services marketing for Intel Americas, told us the chip was developed in close collaboration with all the major Wall Street firms. "The interest on Wall Street in this product is high," Jacobsen said.

Appearing to back up that point, the first demo at the launch this afternoon showed a Black-Scholes pricing model running on a Nehalem-powered two-socket server with four cores per socket and two threads per core, thus running across 16 threads at once. (The more powerful four-socket EX version of Nehalem is due out later this year.) Because one of the features of the Nehalem chip is that processors power down when they're not in use, the demo showed different cores powering up and down as the Black-Scholes calculations progressed.

Cisco, IBM, HP, Sun, Verari and Dell are making blades and traditional servers based on Nehalem. Thomson Reuters and Sungard are among the financial software providers optimizing their products to run on these new multi-core servers.

The key selling point to the new chip is performance. Across a range of workloads, Nehalem servers will deliver 70-125% higher performance than systems based on the Intel Xeon 5400 series, according to the manufacturer. "The part that will be exciting to Wall Street will be the amount of data you'll be able to process on the chip; Wall Street has a phenomenal amount of data," Jacobsen said. Memory improvements have also been made to the chip that should increase the amounts of data it can handle.

Intel has worked on its chips' energy consumption. Nehalem has a processor idle power level of only 10 watts, enabling a 50 percent reduction in system idle power compared to the previous generation. New integrated power gates, based on Intel's unique high-k metal gate technology, allow idle cores to power down independently.

A new feature, Intel Turbo Boost Technology, increases system performance based on the user's workload and environment, boosting the clock speed of one or more of the individual processing cores. Intel Hyper-Threading Technology and Next-Generation Virtualization Technology allow the system to adapt to a broad range of workloads.

Intel also introduced today a Data Center Manager software development kit that enables management console vendors to extend platform power control and set rack and datacenter level power policies dynamically, responding to changing server workloads to ensure that racks do not exceed those power levels.