New Energy-Efficient Servers Feature Intel's 6-Core Processors
Intel on Tuesday unveiled its new 32-nanometer Xeon 5600 processors, code-named "Westmere," that feature up to six CPU cores. The Xeon 5600 series follows on from last year's introduction of the "Nehalem" Xeon 5500 series.
The 15 processors, which include six models with six cores, in the Xeon 5600 family range in power consumption from 40W to 130W.
The common theme among all the various server releases is reduced power consumption in part from the adoption of the new processors. The power saving factor was increased by some of the vendors with the addition of other power-saving features as well.
Hewlett-Packard on Tuesday expanded its ProLiant G6 server portfolio with 16 new servers based on the Xeon 5600 processors.
This includes two new tower servers, six new rack mount servers, five new blade servers and workstations, and three new scale-out servers.
HP's new Xeon 5600-based servers deliver a 27-times improvement in terms of performance per Watt compared to its ProLiant G4 servers from three years ago, with a server consolidation ratio using virtualization technology of up to 20:1, compared to 11:1 using last year's Xeon 5500 processors, said Krista Sattherwaite, manager of HP ProLiant product marketing.
The new HP servers are expected to ship on March 29.
Dell on Tuesday introduced nine new Dell PowerEdge servers featuring the Xeon 5600 processors, including two new blade servers, four rack mount servers, and three tower servers.
Dell also plans to introduce three new workstations based on the Xeon 5600 processors in the next few weeks.
The company said performance of the new servers is up to 69 percent higher than the previous generation of Xeon 5500 servers, while energy efficiency is up compared to the older servers by up to 47 percent.
Dell also boosted the energy efficiency of its servers with the introduction of a new power monitoring feature for its Dell Management Console, and promised to speed up the deployment of new servers with its Lifecycle Controller technology embedded on its new server motherboards.
IBM on Tuesday unveiled a new line of two-socket servers based on the Xeon 5600 processors.
They include two new rack servers the company said offer 50 percent more memory capacity and 60 percent more storage capacity and up to 50 percent more energy efficiency than the previous generation.
Also new are two new enterprise tower servers with twice the storage capacity of older models, two new BladeCenter blade servers that consume 15 percent less power than previous models, and a new high performance computing server featuring a 36 percent improvement in operations per Watt of power consumed.
SGI on Tuesday started shipping servers based on the Xeon 5600 processors.
The new processor is being used across SGI's entire scale-out server lineup, including its Altix ICE HPC clusters, its CloudRack and Rackable scale-out servers, its SGI InfiniStorage Servers, the octane III personal supercomputer, and its Origin 400 blade servers.
The new servers provide a core density improvement of up to 50 percent, with 24 cores per rack U now possible, according to SGI. The company also said the new servers offer up to 40 percent higher performance per Watt and up to a 60-percent increase in overall performance over its prior servers.