Intel today culminated the transition to the company's
"Nehalem" chip design with the launch of the Intel Xeon 7500
processor series.
Expandable to include from two to 256 chips per server, the
new Intel Xeon processors have an average performance three
times that of Intel's existing Xeon 7400 series on common,
leading enterprise benchmarks, and come equipped with more
than 20 new features.
The combined scalable performance, reliability and total
cost of ownership advantages of the Xeon 7500 series will
further accelerate the shift from proprietary systems to
Intel processor-based servers. These new capabilities enable
IT managers to consolidate up to 20 older single-core,
4-chip servers onto a single server using Intel Xeon 7500
series processors while maintaining the same level of
performance. In doing so, they could also see up to a 92
percent estimated reduction in energy costs and a return on
their investment estimated within 1 year due to reductions
in power, cooling and licensing costs.
This is the first Xeon processor to possess Machine Check
Architecture (MCA) Recovery, a feature that allows the
silicon to work with the operating system and virtual
machine manager to recover from otherwise fatal system
errors, a mechanism until now found only in the Intel
Itanium processor family and RISC processors.
The Intel Xeon processor 7500 series offers scalability
through modular building blocks enabled by Intel QuickPath
Technology (QPI) interconnect. With QPI, cost-effective and
highly scalable eight-processor servers that don't require
specialized third-party node controller chips to "glue" the
system together can be built. Intel is also working with
system vendors to deliver "ultra-scale" systems with 16
processors for the enterprise, and up to 256 processors and
support for 16 terabytes (one terabyte is equal to 1,000
gigabytes) of memory for high- performance computing "super
nodes" running bandwidth-demanding applications such as
financial analysis, numerical weather predictions and genome
sequencing.
With up to eight times the memory bandwidth of the Intel
Xeon processor 7400 series and four times the memory
capacity with 16 memory slots per processor, the Xeon 7500
series can support one terabyte (or 1,000 gigabytes) of
memory in a four-socket platform. Intel Virtualization
Technologies, which include new I/O virtualization
capabilities and Intel Virtualization Technology (VT)
FlexMigration, enables live VM migration across all Intel
Core microarchitecture-based platforms to ensure investment
protection for administrators seeking to use pools of
virtualized systems to facilitate failover, disaster
recovery, load balancing and optimal server maintenance and
downtime.
The Intel Xeon processor 7500 series is available in quad,
six and eight core versions with twice the number of threads
thanks to Intel Hyper-Threading Technology. The Intel Xeon
processor 6500 series provides a lower cost solution for
2-chip servers with large memory requirements.
The Intel Xeon processor 7500 series supports up to eight
integrated cores and 16 threads, and can scale up to 32
cores and 64 threads per 4-chip platform or 64 cores and 128
threads per 8-chip platform, and is available with
frequencies up to 2.66 GHz, and 24 MB of Intel Smart Cache
memory, four Intel QPI links and Intel Turbo Boost
technology. Thermal Design Point (TDP) power levels range
from 95 watts to 130 watts.
The Intel Xeon processor X7560, with eight cores and 24MB
cache size, is built for highly parallel, data demanding and
mission-critical workloads, whereas the Intel Xeon processor
X7542 is a frequency-optimized 6-core option at 2.66 GHz
targeted for super node high-performance computing
applications in science and financial services.
The modular scaling of the Xeon 7500 processor works with
the Intel 7500 Chipset and Intel 7500 Scalable Memory
Buffers to enable new OEM system designs and brings a wide
range of socket, memory and I/O, form factor, and
reliability feature sets never before available to the
mainstream server market. Enterprise software vendors
expected to support the high-end features of Intel Xeon
processor 7500-based platforms, include Citrix, IBM,
Microsoft, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP AG and VMware.