Intel launched a version of its “Nehalem” processor architecture for servers on Monday, which it will market under the “Xeon 5500″ name. All told, however, fifteen derivatives of the chip were announced.

According to Patrick Gelsinger, the senior vice president and general manager overseeing the Digital Enteprrise Group at Intel, the introduction of the Xeon 5500 is the most important introduction of a server processor in over a decade, he said at a launch of the Xeon 5500 at Intel’s headquarters here.

“We see this as significant and as transformational as the Pentium Pro was in its day,” Gelsinger said. Gelsinger also referred to the Xeon 5500 as “the greatest leap in history of performance of server processors.”

Intel has shipped hundreds of thousands of the new Intel Xeon 5500s since December, when it first began production. Although Intel said that more than 230 unique systems are shipping with the new chip inside, a collection of end-user customers gathered on stage, from Dreamworks to Humana, almost all said that they were still in testing or development.

The Nehalem architecture was already launched as part of the Core i7 product for PCs. Intel also announced the 5520 chipset and the Intel 85299 10-Gbit Ethernet controller, as well as the Intel Data Center Manager software. The latter product overlaps some of the services that OEMs themselves provide; for those that do not, however, the service allows an IT manager to cap the amount of energy a datacenter consumes. The software translates that control into throttling individual microprocessor cores.