Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket - George Orwell
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Upcoming Xeon Chips make e-tail debut
INTEL'S SHINY new Xeon server chips have popped up on e-tailers this week, giving us a sneak peak at what we can expect when the company launches them officially sometime soon.
Amongst other goodies on offer, online hardware retailers were advertising quad-core chips from the Xeon 5500 series - belonging to Chipzilla's Nehalem EP series of server chips for dual-socket servers and workstations - with speeds ranging between 2.0GHz and 3.2GHz.
Like all chips built on Intel's Nehalem architecture, the Xeon fritters all have QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) technology to purportedly speed up server performance. Intel has boasted that because its QPI tech has a memory controller bunged in, it allows the CPU to communicate with system components, like graphics cards, more quickly.
Intel has also claimed the upcoming chips will reduce some of the bottlenecks experienced in previous chip microarchitectures, whilst the four cores will be capable of executing two software threads concurrently, running eight threads at the same time.
Quad-core Xeon X5500-series processors running between 2.66GHz and 2.93GHz, with 8MB of shared L3 cache seem to be priced between $1,000 and $1,650 whilst the Xeon W5580, which runs at 3.2GHz, is being offered by Keenzo Electronics for $1,785 and for $1,679 by Tech Micro.
Xeon E5500 series chips running between 2.0GHz and 2.53GHz, like the Xeon E5504 and E5506 with 4MB of shared L3 cache, are on offer from between $250 to $320 at e-tailers, whilst the Xeon E5520, E5530 and E5540 chips, with 8MB of L3 cache, are going for anywhere between $400 to $800.
A ThinkStation D10 workstation, based on the Xeon E5540 processor, was also spotted on Provantage for a whopping $4,184.
Intel's last big release was its Core i7 chips for high-end gaming desktops back in November, which Chipzilla says it will scale down for more mainstream use and notebooks later in 2009. In the meanwhile, when the Xeon chips are released, they'll go head to head with AMD's quad-core Opteron "Shanghai" chips, launched last year.
AMD has just refreshed its Shanghai lineup, which now has chips running at speeds of between 2.1GHz to 2.8GHz. µ
Tags: Intel
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It's Peek not Peak. Kids of today...
Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.
then why don't they build mutli-core cpu's that "appear" to be single core cpu's? This would give the benefit of more processing power without needing to re-write all the sofware to take advantage of the cores.
Contact me via The Inq if you want to patent this ;-)
I could of sworn the new Xeon Nehalems were based upon DDR3 and used a entire new socket based upon 1366.
Yet the Lenovo computer on the link is showing DDR2 667 MHZ??
"A ThinkStation D10 workstation, based on the Xeon E5540 processor, was also spotted on Provantage..."
But looking at the specs, the motherboard does *not* seem to take advantage of the triple-channel I7 memory controller--only 8 slots, and memory options come in *pairs*. I'm underwhelmed.
Take a look here for a comparison:
http://www.anandtech.com/weblog/showpost.aspx?i=532 Yes, that's right, dual Xeon setup (2 quad processors) can easily beat quad Opteron setup (4 quad processors).