Saturday, April 18, 2009

Intel unveils Xeon 5500 series

INTEL Corp has announced its Xeon ­processor 5500 series — the new enterprise-class processor which the company claims is the most significant since the launch of the Pentium Pro processor almost 15 years ago.

Previously codenamed “Nehalem-EP,” the Xeon 5500 series brings most of the features found in Nehalem-based consumer desktop processors, such as turbo boost and hyper-threading, as well as the next generation of Intel’s virtualisation technology.

The Xeon 5000 series are quad-core processors built on Intel’s 45nm High-K metal gate technology and features Intel’s QuickPath — a high-speed interconnect which links the processor to other components.

According to Sunny Ooi, market ­development manager for Intel Malaysia, the Xeon 5500 series is significant step forward for Intel because the technology in these enterprise-class processors offers a 70% to 120% gain in performance over the Xeon 5400 series and yet consumes nearly 50% less power.

The Xeon 5500 series is available from more than 70 of Intel’s partners, such as Dell, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Fujitsu.

According to Ooi, several local companies are looking into buying Xeon 5500-based systems, although specific announcements on these customers will only be made by the various partners themselves later this month.

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