The chips have shipped to about 30 laptop and desktop PC makers for testing, said Paul Otellini, Intel's CEO, during an earnings conference call. The chips could be on sale in PCs by early next year, he said.
Westmere is a shrink of Intel’s Nehalem microarchitecture, which is used in the Core i7 desktop and Xeon 5500 server chips. Nehalem integrates a memory controller with the CPU and provides a faster pipeline for communication with other system components. The laptop version of Westmere is code-named Arrandale, while the desktop chips are code-named Clarkdale.