Intel Xeon E5

Xeon E5-4600, Xeon E5-2400, Xeon E3-1200 v2

In the middle of May of Intel provided 28 new server processors of Xeon. Chips of E5-4600 and E5-2400 series are manufactured on regulations of 32-nanometer technical process based on architecture of Sandy Bridge, they are distinguished by higher rates of performance and energy efficiency in comparison with analogs of the previous generation. According to representatives of the company, they will allow customers to use within the existing infrastructure it is more than processors, so it is more than computing power, without the need for increase in energy consumption or operating costs. 11 processors of E3-1200 v2 family are of a bigger interest - it is the first Xeon, Ivy Bridge made on regulations of 22-nanometer technical process based on architecture.

Earlier in April, 2011 Intel provided Xeon E7 family for the scalable systems with the high level of availability. In March, 2012 E5-2600 line for cloud environments and analytical tasks was issued. The last announcement became the third important event in series of updates of server platforms of Intel. According to Michel Fischer (Michele Fisher), the manager on strategic marketing and business development of Intel, the family of E5-4600 chips will find application in environments with a high density of computing power, for example, in supercomputers, E5-2400 is intended for dual-processor platforms which find the consumers in a segment of SMB.

Are designed by Xeon E3-1200 v2 for single-processor compact servers or as they are often called, microservers. At the moment they occupy a narrow niche in the market, however it quickly grows. To products of this type in addition to Intel a keen interest is taken by her competitors, in particular, ARM Holdings and production partners of the British developer of chips. Distinctive feature of Ivy Bridge is use of three-barrier transistors which allow to increase at the same time performance and to reduce energy consumption – key attributes for microservers and other energy saving systems.

IBM, Dell and HP headed the long list of collectors who are ready to offer workstations and servers on the basis of new chips. It also included Lenovo and SGI.

Xeon E5-2600, Xeon E5-1600

Intel provided new family of Xeon E5-2600 chips, its corporation positions not only for dual-processor configurations of h86-servers and workstations, but also DWH and communications systems. The lineup includes 17 types of products worth from 198 dollars up to 2050 dollars in batches from 1000 pieces. Three models of the Intel Xeon processors E5-1600 worth from 284 dollars up to 1080 dollars are intended for single-processor workstations.

Processors contain from 2 to 8 cores and allow to address up to 768 GB of memory. According to the statements of Intel, performance of Xeon E5-2600 on separate tasks is 80% higher in comparison with the previous generation of Xeon of series 5600. Partly it is promoted by a command set of Intel Advanced Vector Extension (AVX) optimized for applications of a financial analysis and creation of content.

The developer focuses attention on record energy efficiency of new processors (performance in terms of unit of the consumed electric power) which is more than 50% higher than Xeon 5600. Besides, instruments of control of energy consumption in real time, in particular, of Intel Node Manager and Intel Data Center Manager contain Xeon E5-2600. All this is especially important at creation of computing infrastructure of DPC as allows to cut down capital costs and expenses on program licenses.

As good incentive for growth of sales volumes of the announced processors distribution of the concept of cloud computing should serve, – Diane Bryant, the vice president and the head of service of information technologies of Intel considers. By way of illustration representatives of the company give the following digits: by 2015 in the world there will be 15 billion devices connected to the Internet and more than 3 billion active users of online resources. It in turn will lead to annual increase in volumes of traffic of DPC by 33% which by 2015 will exceed 4.8 zettabyte. As a result, the quantity of cloud servers around the world should grow more than three times.

As usual, products of Intel got broad industry support. Deliveries of systems based on Xeon E5 were already started by Acer, Asus, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Lenovo, NEC, Oracle, SGI, etc.