Vendors jostle for Intel Xeon E7
Hewlett-Packard and Supermicro are among the first to max out the E7's power in 80-core, eight-socket servers. Other vendors, such as Cisco and Dell, appear to be satisfied, initially, with maximum four-socket systems with up to 40 cores.
Intel released its most powerful Xeon server family on Tuesday. The Xeon E7 now takes the top end of the brand, while the E5 and E3 families hold the mid-range and entry-level positions.
Based on Intel's latest 32nm Sandy Bridge process technology, the new Xeon processors have up to 10 cores with Hyper-Threading, and deliver up to 40% greater performance than the previous Xeon 7500 series processor, says Tom's Hardware Guide.
The new processor family contains 18 new processors for two-, four- and eight-socket servers, and is expandable to servers with 256 sockets.
Intel boasts that a single Xeon processor E7-based server can replace a current 18 dual-core server.
For big tasks, Intel is offering 10 advanced 10-core versions of the chip, led by the E7-8870, E7-4870 and E7-2870, all of which reach 2.4 GHz with a TDP of 130 watts.
“Now we are saying there is no workload in the world that Xeon can't handle,” said Kirk Skaugen, the Intel VP who oversees the Xeon and Itanium effort, writes The Wall Street Journal.
The main reason now to choose Itanium, Skaugen added, is to run software written for the operating systems that work only on Itanium-powered servers. “It's strictly an operating system choice now,” he said, rather than a choice about reliable hardware.
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