Further expanding its quad-core processor family lineup, Intel has announced two energy-efficient 50-watt server processors that represent a decrease ranging from 35% to nearly 60% in power from Intel's existing 80- and 120-watt quad-core server products.
These new processors, requiring just 12.5 watts of power for each of the four cores, deliver similar performance yet set a new standard in energy efficiency, said Intel, which has introduced 11 server, workstation and desktop PC quad-core processors since November 2006.
The two low-voltage processors, the Intel Xeon processor L5320 and L5310, operate at 1.86GHz and 1.60GHz respectively, feature a unique 8MB of on die cache for faster memory data communication and run on dedicated 1066MHz front side buses. In 1,000 unit quantities the L5320 is priced at US$519 and the L5310 at US$455.
These processors can be coupled with Intel's existing "Bensley" server platform and have been designed to be "drop-in" compatible with the existing dual-core and quad-core Intel Xeon processor families.
Servers based on the new low-power, quad-core processors are designed for dense Internet datacenters, blade servers and industries such as financial services where the scale and density of servers are highly sensitive to power, real estate and cooling costs. The potential for cost savings by replacing aging infrastructure with quad-core Intel Xeon processors and deploying virtualization technology can be as much as US$6,000 per year over the lifetime of each server based on Intel's own evaluations.
In addition, these new processors represent a nearly ten-fold improvement in power consumption per core in just one and half years, said Intel.
Servers based on these new processors are expected to be available worldwide over the next few months from Acer, Dell, Digital Henge, Fujitsu Siemens, Hewlett Packard (HP), HCL, IBM, Rackable Systems, Samsung Electronics, Verari, Wipro and other companies.
Intel Xeon 50-watt quad-core processor
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