Intel rolls out 15 new Xeon 5600 chips

From InfoWorld: Intel introduced a line of Xeon server chips that operate up to 60 percent faster than previous server processors, the company said on Tuesday.

The 15 new processors in the Xeon 5600 line include low-power chips and come in quad-core and six-core variants, the company said. The processors are faster than the older Xeon 5500 series chips, which were launched about a year ago.

The clock speeds of the new chips range from 1.86GHz for the quad-core Xeon L5609 processor, which consumes only 40 watts of power, to 3.46GHz for the fastest Xeon X5677 six-core chip, which draws up to 130 watts. All the processor chips include 12MB of cache.

A lot of businesses still run single-core chips in servers, and adoption of the new chips is an "economic no-brainer," said Boyd Davis, general manager of the data center marketing group at Intel. One Xeon 5600 server will be able to replace up to 15 single-core servers, Davis said. A low-voltage, six-core Xeon 2.26GHz L5640 chip drawing 60 watts will deliver comparable performance to the older quad-core 2.93GHz Xeon 5570 chip using 95 watts, Intel said.

The performance and power benefits offered by the new processors could lead to increased server shipments, which have either fallen or grown slowly since the start of 2009, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. The server upgrade cycle has been glacial as corporate spending has been restricted because of the economy, but there are signs of an uptick in enterprise spending, McCarron said.

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