Intel has announced a new processor series for performance servers called Xeon 7400, and it is of course based on Intel's 45nm technology and the first hexa-core processor on the market. The processor architecture is known as Dunnington and the top models share 16MB L3 cache, which is something Intel claims will boost performance in virtualization environments and demanding tasks, such as database and resource planning systems. Intel also claims that thanks to its 45nm technology, these new processors can enjoy up to 50% performance boost, while lowering power consumption up to 10%.
As we mentioned above, the Xeon 7400 series is for the performance server segment and this is made quite clear by the fact that these will only work on platforms with up to 16 processors, for a total of 96 processor cores per system.
The Xeon 7400 processors will be shipped in seven different flavors where the clock frequencies will go up as high as 2.66GHz, while other models have a thermal design power as low as 50W.
"The Xeon® 7400 processor series is compatible with Intel’s existing Xeon 7300 series platforms and the Intel® 7300 chipset with memory capacity up to 256GB, allowing IT departments to quickly deploy the new processor into a stable platform infrastructure. Starting today, servers based on the Intel® Xeon® 7400 processor series are expected to be announced by more than 50 system manufacturers around the world, including four-socket rack servers from Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens, Hitachi, HP, IBM, NEC, Sun, Supermicro and Unisys; four-socket blade servers from Egenera, HP, Sun and NEC; and servers that scale up to 16-sockets from IBM, NEC and Unisys."
This is most likely the last of the Xeon series based on the Penryn architecture before Intel will unleash its Nehalem architecture by the end of the year.
Intel launches hexa-core Dunnington, Xeon 7400
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