SoftLayer Technologies, a provider of on-demand cloud and dedicated hosting offerings, has launched Sandy Bridge servers featuring Intel Xeon 1200 Series processors.

The 1200 series is part of Intel’s next-gen Sandy Bridge processor family, which provides new features ideal for powering cloud applications, virtualised computing, and content streaming.

The Sandy Bridge microarchitecture unifies processor cores, memory controller, last-level cache (LLC), and graphics and media processing for new advantages including fast core access to shared data in last-level cache, higher memory bandwidth, and intelligent "performance to workload" matching, the company said.

In addition, Sandy Bridge gives compute-intensive apps new performance gains with Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), a new 256 bit instruction set extension to Intel SSE, plus a new Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), operating system, and virtual machine manager (VMM) enhancements.

The new server benefits include: AES; new Intel advanced vector extensions (256 bit); Intel Turbo Boost 2.0; 8MB L3 CPU Cache; Intel hyper-threading; and data centre manageability interface.

SoftLayer chief operations officer Sam Fleitman said their customers are the companies creating new Web applications and advanced online services, or radically expanding their global IT infrastructure.