With Xeon E5, Intel Targets the Data Center

xeon-e5-efficiency

Intel says its Xeon E5-2600 family of processors offers energy efficiency improvements of up to 50 percent over its Xeon 5600 products. (Source: Intel Corp.)

Intel today unveiled the next generation of its Intel Xeon processor, the E5-2600 product family, designed to bring improved computing power and energy efficiency for servers in enterprise data centers.

"The E5 family is truly the heart of the data center,"said Diane Bryant, Intel vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group. "And we mean ALL data centers.

“The growth in cloud computing and connected devices is transforming the way businesses benefit from IT products and services,” said Bryant. "The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family is designed to address these challenges by offering unparalleled, balanced performance across compute, storage and network, while reducing operating costs.”

Supports Eight Cores per Processor

With up to eight cores per processor and up to 768GB of system memory, Intel says the Xeon E5-2600 increases performance by up to 80 percent compared to its previous Xeon 5600 series. The new Xeon E5 processors feature Intel Advanced Vector Extension (AVX), which can increase the performance on compute-intensive applications such as financial analysis, media content creation and high performance computing. Intel has published details of its performance testing with gear from various OEMs running the E5 series.

Intel has refined its approach to I/O efficiency, integrating its I/O controller directly into the processor and adding support for PCIexpress 3.0, which boosts bandwidth usage through architectural improvements. The company also announced Intel Data Direct I/O, which allows Ethernet controllers and adapters to route I/O traffic directly to processor cache, reducing trips to system memory and reducing power consumption and I/O latency.

Intel also said the E5-2600 product family will have improved energy efficiency, and feature Intel Node Manager and Data Center Manager provide real-time power and thermal data to system management consoles. Dell has already integrated these tools into its Open Manage management software in its latest line of PowerEdge servers, which it announced last week.

Manufacturers expected to announce offerings based on the Intel Xeon processor E5 family-based platforms. These manufacturers include Acer, Asus, Bull, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi, Huawei, IBM, Lenovo, NEC, Oracle, Quanta, SGI, Supermicro and Unisys.

The Xeon processor E5-2600 product family will be offered with 17 different parts which range in price from $198 to $2,050 in quantities of 1,000. Additionally three single-socket Intel Xeon processor E5-1600 parts will be offered for workstations which range in price from $284 to $1,080.