Intel pushes savings with new 10-core server chips

From InfoWorld: Intel has announced the Xeon E7 series of chips with 10 cores, which the company said could help cut power and maintenance costs in data centers while adding more processing power.

The Xeon E7 chips, formerly code-named Westmere-EX, will be 40 percent faster than their predecessors, the Xeon 7500 chips, said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group. The Xeon 7500 chips are eight-core processors, launched last year.

Intel is targeting the Xeon E7 chips at high-end servers running data-intensive applications such as databases and ERP (enterprise resource planning) applications. The processors will be made using the 32-nanometer process, and will be based on the Westmere microarchitecture.

A single Xeon E7 server will be able to replace 18 dual-core servers, which would help consolidate the number of servers in data centers, Skaugen said. The E7 chips also have power-efficiency features, such as a mechanism to shut down idle processing cores, to reduce power consumption. Features like support for low-voltage memory could also help reduce the power drawn by servers.

Customers will be able to build 256-way servers based on the processors, Skaugen said. A four-socket server with an E7 chip will be able to support up to 2TB of memory, which is double that of the older Xeon 7500 processors. The company is offering 10 new 10-core chips, including the E7-8870, E7-4870 and E7-2870, which operate at speeds of up to 2.4GHz and consume up to 130 watts. A 4U server will be able to accommodate up to 64 memory slots.

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