Intel (INTC) announced new hardware and software products on Thursday, paving the way for system manufacturers and software developers to create higher performing supercomputers without taking up more space.

The Santa Clara Calif.-based company said that it will unveil the first industry-standard quad-core server processor for dual processor systems this month, promising more than six times the performance of its single-core server processors.

In supercomputing configurations, 44 of Intel's new chip, the Xeon 5300, can deliver 1.8 teraflops of peak performance consuming less than 10,000 watts of energy. Comparatively, supercomputers built a decade ago using Pentium Pro processors required 9000 processors and 800,000 watts of energy to offer the same performance, the company said.

The latest Intel technology innovations have enabled new computing models and form factors that were previously unavailable for high-performance computing which, in turn, hastens new scientific discoveries, product designs and simulations among many other discoveries around the world, said Boyd Davis, director of marketing for Intel's server platform group.

The chip manufacturer also released new software development tools to create and optimize software code for use on cluster server solutions - or parallel computing environments.

Shares of the world's largest semiconductor firm closed at $20.42 on Thursday, down $0.29 or 1.40 percent.

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