Intel's new Xeon 5500 platform promises 'greatest leap' for data processing

31st March 2009
Intel's new Xeon 5500 platform promises 'greatest leap' for data processing

March 31, '09; BANGALORE: Think of the speed of an F-16 fighter aircraft, coupled with the cargo capacity of a jumbo jet and the fuel efficiency of a glider -- that according to Intel's Pat Gelsinger is a combo akin to what the new Xeon processor family 5500 offers. Shedding the code name Nehalem, the new Xeon platform, is geared to meet what the company perceives to be a huge appetite for high performance computing performance that has already crossed the r lakshman rekha or to put it another way, shattered the glass ceiling, of a peta flop, that is one thousand trillion floating point operations a minute

The new chips -- Xeon X5570, X5560 and X5550 -- are said to be twice as fast as the previous Xeon 5540 series, They boast a turbo mode, where the user can shut down one or more cores either to gain energy efficiencies or to boost the performance of the operating cores.

India-based customers can expect the first Xeon-5500 series -fuelled servers and PCs from Dell, HP, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Acer, Lenovo, HCL and Wipro. R.Ravichandran, Director – Sales, Intel(South Asia), said the new processors would stimulate advances in virtualization and cloud computing in the data centre business.

EMBEDDED VERSIONS ALSO: Available in dual or quad core versions the Xeon 5500 platform for embedded computing has wattages in the range of 38 to 80 and can be used in single or dual socket configurations. Applications will range from storage and security servers to large infrastructure or communications servers... down to application-specific appliances.

The total launch today encompasses 17 separate enterprise class processors and the prices span a wide swath from the equivalent of $ 188 to $ 1600 for 1000 plus quantities.

You will find a 12-page PDF with Intel's Xeon 5500 product briefs here:


http://download.intel.com/products/processor/xeon/dc55kprodbrief.pdf