Intel on Monday debuted its Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, formerly dubbed Nehalem-EP. A number of server vendors, including HP, IBM, Sun and NEC rallied around with announcements of their own. The 17 processors in the Xeon 5500 processor family adjust to energy-use levels and are faster than their predecessors. In addition they use Intel Turbo Boost Technology, Hyper-Threading, integrated power gates and Intel’s Virtualization Technology. Turbo Boost Technology increases system performance based on the user’s workload and environment and dynamically adjusts the clock speed of one or more processor cores.
The new processors deliver triple the memory bandwidth of previous processors. The energy efficiency features include a processor idle power level of 10 watts, a 50% reduction over previous processors. Integrated power gates let idle cores power down independently.
Further, the 5500 series has 15 operating states, which allow power consumption to be adjusted based on throughput with performance decreases.
Intel claims that more than 70 systems manufacturers are introducing systems based on the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series. Among them are:
Penguin Computing – Relion 1700 and 2700 Series servers for high-performance computing. The Relion 1700 and 2700 are dual-processor servers; the Relion 1702 is a twin-node, dual-processor server.
Lenovo rolled out the ThinkServer RD210 and RD220 rackmount servers. The RD210 is a 1U server; the RD220 is 2U.
Sun introduced the Sun Fire X4270 a two-processor server with eight cores and 16 threads.
NEC rolled out the NEC Express5800/SIGMABLADE and NEC Express5800 rack servers.
HP launched the HP ProLiant G6 server family, a collection of 11 tower, rack and blade platforms. The servers incorporate what HP calls the Sea of Sensors, which automatically track and adjust fans, memory and IO to optimize system cooling. Also the new servers use a Common Power Slot design, which lets customers choose from four power supplies.
IBM rolled out the System x3550 M2 and x3650M2 rack mounted servers with voltage regulators to save on energy consumption. The company also announced the BladeCenter HS22, which has 96GB of memory and can process twice as many transactions as previous versions, and the System x iDataPlex dx360M2 blade servers.
