Intel today announced the Xeon 7300/7200 series of processors, the final products to be based on the company's Core microarchitecture. Manufactured using a 65nm process, the new Xeon MP chips (codenamed Tigerton) are part of the Caneland platform, which has been designed largely for virtualisation applications. This means that the processors should provide up to 2.5x the virtualisation performance and up to 3x the performance-per-watt compared to the preceding Xeon 7100 platform based on the Netburst architecture. There are eight new processors in total, six quad-core models with clock speeds ranging from 1.6GHz through to 2.93GHz, with respective prices ranging from $851 to $2301, and two dual-core models running at 2.4GHz and 2.93GHz being priced at $856 and $1177 respectively. Interestingly, the dual-core models can support twice as much memory as the quad-core, which could allow for cheaper servers where memory is more important than being able to run multiple threads quickly. This announcement comes just five days before AMD launches its new Barcelona processors.