Intel targets data centres with new processors

Addressing the incredible growth of data traffic in the cloud, Intel has announced the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family, Money Control reports.

These new processors deliver leadership performance, best data centre performance per watt, breakthrough I/O innovation, and trusted hardware security features to enable IT to scale.

According to Computerworld, the processors include up to eight cores and are up to 80% faster than their predecessors, said Diane Bryant, VP and GM of the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group.

The processors consume half the power of their predecessors, Intel said.

The latest Xeon chip's release comes at a time when search, social gaming, social networking and e-commerce companies are building data centres at a frenetic pace, Information Week writes.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini has estimated from Intel's own statistics and other sources that $450 billion a year is being spent on data centre construction, "one of the more significant capital expenditures" of our time, he said at Dell World last November. The E5-2600 is meant to power the servers going into those new data centres.