IBM will soon offer two servers with Intel’s first dual-core Xeon chip, the company said Friday, a sign that Intel’s high-performance dual-core processors are gaining steam.

will soon offer two servers with Intel’s first dual-core Xeon chip, the company said Friday, a sign that Intel’s high-performance dual-core processors are gaining steam.

The chip, code-named Paxville, will be available on IBM’s xSeries 336 and xSeries 346 systems. Dual-core technology combines two processing units onto a single chip, which increases performance since the chips can more quickly process information requiring a lot of memory.

IBM already offers dual-core products on the x86 platform—the architecture used in more than 80 percent of computers and servers—including servers that use Intel rival AMD’s dual-core Opteron chip.

Hewlett-Packard and Dell are also offering servers with the dual-core Xeon chip. Intel’s dual-core processor has been long-awaited, especially since the company had fallen behind AMD in introducing processors based on x86 architecture—named after the processor first developed by Intel.

and in introducing processors based on x86 architecture—named after the processor first developed by Intel.

Computer company officials said the market is eager for servers with-dual core technology.

“Customers know that dual core is the future of x86 architecture computing, so they will want to try out this new model,” said Jonathan Coleman, IBM’s xSeries product marketing manager. “They know that their applications can benefit from the additional performance that the… processors can offer.”

Dell has made similar predictions.

“[Dual-core processors] will help customers get more out of their IT investments today while optimizing capabilities to handle growth and future performance demands,” said Jeff Clarke, senior vice president of Dell Product Group. Dell will make its PowerEdge servers available with the chip later this month.

IBM’s new servers start shipping this month as well. They are based on IBM’s eXtended Design Architecture (XDA), which was designed in part to handle dual-core computing. IBM said the servers have more memory sockets and more PCI slots than those of their rivals, enabling the system to install more memory and add more network or storage connectivity.

HP is also expected to debut dual-core Xeon chips on its ProLiant servers on Monday, when Intel holds its launch event for the processors in San Francisco.