Intel Xeon E5 coming soon
The E5 chip will have up to eight processing cores, and is able to run 16 threads per socket, says Kirk Skaugen, VP and GM of Intel's Data Centre Group, at the Intel Developer Forum, in San Francisco. The chip has already started shipping in volume and will deliver significantly higher performance than current Xeon chips, Skaugen said.
The 'Sandy Bridge-EN' variant of the Xeon E5 chip plugs into the Socket B2 socket and will be available in single and two-socket servers that are 'cost optimised', reports The Register.
The 'Sandy Bridge-EP' snuggles into the Socket R socket, the same one that will be used for the higher-end 'Sandy Bridge-EX' processor at some point.
The Xeon E5 is a big deal for Intel, with projected sales figures for this chip to be up to 20 times the initial sales rate of the previous generation, going primarily to cloud and high performance computing customers (HPC), says APC.
The E5 will succeed the Xeon 5600 chips, which were released around the middle of last year and were based on the Westmere architecture, according to ComputerWorld.
Intel has 400 server design wins already for the chip, which is almost double that of the Xeon 5500 chips that were released in 2009, Skaugen said. The chip will compete with new server chips based on the Bulldozer microarchitecture from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).
AMD earlier this month said it had started shipping its 16-core Interlagos chips to server makers, who would release products in the fourth quarter.
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