On Monday March 30, Intel announced the availability of their much anticipated new line of processors, the Intel® Xeon® Processor 5500 series–nicknamed Nehalem.

Red Hat, a long-time partner of the market-leading chip maker , collaborated on the chip’s debut, testing and optimizing the recently released Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.3 on the new processor.

Changes include a new processor architecture, platform architecture, memory subsystem, I/O subsystem, and options (including SSD and 10GbE).

So what’s the big deal? Why all the fuss? Here’s just a few of the improvements wrought by the combination of Intel’s processing power and Red Hat advancements in performance and efficiency...