That same week AMD launched its 12-core Opteron processors, the Intel - apparently delayed - with the company's first eight cores Xeon processors, also known as Nehalem-EX. Although eight fewer than twelve, laws Intel record performance with the new processor series, based on 45 nanometer process technology.
In short, the new Xeon 7500 series give an average performance leap of 200 percent compared to the Xeon 7400 series.
The new processors will be suitable for server configurations from two to eight shelves. This is made possible with the Intel QuickPath Interconnect technology (QPI), a point-to-point connection with bandwidth of up to 25.6 gigabytes per second. With third-party node can control the number of processors per system increased to 256.
Intel will also have equipped the new Xeon processors with 20 new forms of RAS functionality (reliability, availability and service portability), which previously has been offered for RISC processors and Intel's own Itanium processors. Among other things, supported the Machine Check Architecture (MCA) where the hardware works with your operating system and control system for virtual machines in order to resurrect the system failure that would otherwise have been fatal.
Xeon 7500 series delivers up to eight times the memory bandwidth as the 7400 series supports four times as much memory with 16 memory slots per processor. This means the company says that a system with four processors can support one terabyte of memory, if it is used for memory modules of 16 gigabytes. Memory modules with 32 gigabyte capacity is likely to market during the spring.
The highest clock model, the Xeon X7542, do not support Hyper-Threading.
According to Intel over 50 different server vendors adopt the new processors, which in principle should be used with chipset Intel 7500 chipset.
Xeon E7520 is the cheapest model with a retail price of $ 856. Xeon X7560 is the most expensive model. This costs $ 3692 - 2.66 times as much as the most expensive AMD Opteron processor.
We have not yet seen any independent benchmarks of Intel's new processors, but even the slightly older Xeon X5650 does well in the competition with 12-core Opteron 6174, according to bit-tech.net.
