Intel today announced its new line of Xeon 5600 processors that promise to be faster and more energy efficient compared to the previous Xeon 5500 series launched just a year ago. The new 5600 chips offer low-power, quad- and six-core models and run up to 60 percent faster than their 5500-series counterparts. The 5600 chips, part of the Westmere architecture, are manufactured using a 32-nanometer process and all come with 12MB of L2 cache. The CPUs also include Hyper-Threading technology, allowing each chip to process two threads simultaneously. With many companies still running single-core servers, the advent of quad- and six-core serves means that datacenters can improve performance and reduce energy costs by switching to the new chips without having to increase the number of servers. In fact, according to Intel, one Xeon 5600 could potentially replace up to 15 single-core servers . Speeds range from 1.86GHz for the quad-core Xeon L5609 processor to 3.46GHz for the fastest Xeon X5677 six-core chip. Prices range from $387 to $1,663 and major OEM partners will be announcing servers based on the new chips today with shipments expected later this month.