McKendrick: Intel Unleashes Latest Version of Xeon, Its Warrior Processor

Intel Corporation signaled that it intends to take direct aim at the
heart of the data center market with the latest release of its workhorse
Xeon processor, the 5600 series.

The processor giant says a single Xeon 5600 processor-based server can
replace up to 15 single-core servers. Intel also says the new series can
improve performance by 60 percent, while reducing energy consumption by
up to 30 percent.

That’s not a bad start, considering IBM claims it can replace hundreds
of servers with its System z and System i boxes. Most of the leading
server vendors have signed up to market Xeon, including IBM itself,
which offers competing chipsets in its POWER series, as well as System z
for large-scale operations. Additional vendors read like a who’s-who in
large data center computing: Cisco, Cray, Fujitsu, HP, Oracle and SGI.
(Interesting to see Oracle, formerly an all-software company, join this
bunch – this is via its Sun acquisition, of course.)

I remember when I first met with the Intel folks back in 1998, when they
were first unveiling Xeon. Intel’s Larry Michel told me that for the
first time, Intel was targeting the $25,000-and-up server market, an
area where the chipmaker’s presence was been weak or nonexistent.

Clearly, things have changed a lot since then, and Intel running either
Linux or Windows-based systems powers quite a few fairly large
operations. Now, taking a cue from analysts and vendors discussing the
need to reign in server sprawl (a lot of caused by Intel-based servers),
Intel is looking at the green data center and server consolidation
market as an area of opportunity.

And the increased competition only makes things better for data center
managers.