At the LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco, Intel and Dell showed off servers using Intel’s forthcoming high-end “Tulsa” Xeon processor, according to CNET News.com

Although Intel has not formally announced the processor presented at LinuxWorld, it has already begun shipping for it. Tulsa is a dual-core processor and is the last of the NetBurst lineage of x86 chips which was not one the most successful lineage from Intel. The recent Core microarchitecture which performs better and uses less electricity has now replaced NetBurst.

Despite being outdated, as newer and better processors have been released, Intel still considered it should give Tulsa a chance. Intel’s move could be explained by the difference between Tulsa and the newer Core-based Xeon called Woodcrest. The first is designed for four-processor machines as the latter is used only in dual-processor servers.

Keeping that in mind, Tulsa may come a counter-solution to AMD’s new line of Opteron processors which in 2007 will be replaced by quad-core model that plug into the same “Socket F”.

The “Tulsa” Xeon has a 1MB of level-two cache memory per core and the two cores share no less that 16MB of level-three cache memory, more that any other x86 processor. Tulsa also uses 1.3 billion transistors, almost as many as the 1.6 billion in Intel’s “Montecino” version of the Itanium processor. The processor runs at a top speed of 3.4 GHz and comes in two variants: one high-performance model that consumes 150 watts of power and one geared for rack-mounted servers that consumes 95 watts.

As we mentioned above, no official release of the “Tulsa” Xeon has been made and no price information leaked.