Intel formally announced its six-core 45nm Dunnington chip Monday, officially christening it the Xeon 7400 and claiming it sets a new standard in virtualization performance.

AMD doesn’t have anything like it.

The company said a full-blown Dunnington with six cores and 16MB of shared memory could increase the performance of applications built for virtualized environments and data-demanding workloads like databases, BI, ERP and server consolidation by close to 50%.

Dunnington, which might cut platform power by 10%, will support hardware with 16 sockets, or 96 cores, and may cannibalize Intel’s own Itanium chip as well as eat into Sun’s Sparc and IBM’s Power base because of cheaper, near comparable performance, features aside.

The part’s Virtualization FlexMigration widgetry is supposed to enable VM migration from previous, present and future generations of Core microarchitecture platforms.

Intel says the feature ensures investment protection for administration establishing pools of virtualized systems and folks using pools for failover, disaster recovery, load balancing and optimizing server maintenance and downtime.

There are seven models of the thing, which comes in quad versions, priced from $856-$2,729 in quantities of 1,000. Frequencies can hit 2.66GHz and power levels can be down as low as 50W. One of the Dunningtons is a 65W version whose cores consume less than 11W apiece.

Dunnington is compatible with the Intel 7300 chipset with up to 256GB so they can upgrade Xeon quad-core 7300s.

Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu Siemens, Hitachi, HP, IBM, NEC, Sin Supermicro and Unisys are putting out four-socket Dunnington rack servers and Egenera, HP, Sun and NEC have four-socket Dunnington blade servers. IBM, NEC and Unisys have Dunnington server that scale to the maximum 16 sockets.