In what has been one of the worst kept secrets in the technology industry Intel has finally launched its new family of Xeon E5-2600 processors, which it says are geared towards dealing with cloud computing, big data and the consumerisation of IT.
At an event held in London the company said the new range is more powerful and efficient than its predecessor. Intel senior fellow and CTO of its data centre division, Steve Pawlowski, said the new processors are 80% more powerful than the previous range.
Intel claims these improvements are needed if data centres are to cope with the changing IT environment. The company predicts that there will be 15 billion devices connected to the internet by 2015, along with 3 billion users. Graham Palmer, Intel managing director for the UK, said that for every 600 new smartphones or 120 new tablets activated, another server is required to service their needs.
Genevieve Bell, director of the interaction and experience research group, said that while many end users may not know or even care, these three main trends – cloud computing, consumerisation and big data – all require a physical presence somewhere, they will "touch down" in a data centre. That is where Intel’s new processors come in, she said.
The updates focus on four areas: performance, energy efficiency, I/O bandwidth and security, said Pawlowski.
The Xeon E5-2600 family supports up to eight cores per processor, double the previous number, and up to 768GB of system memory. The number of threads per socket also increases, from 12 to 16.
The product line also claims to improve energy efficiency by more than 50% compared to the previous 5600 series. The new range supports Intel’s Node Manager and Data Centre Manager, which Intel says can offer improved monitoring and power usage control capabilities.
Also included in the new range is Intel Data Direct I/O, which allows Ethernet controllers and adapters to route I/O traffic directly to processor cache, reducing strain on system memory. Intel says this reduces power consumption and I/O latency.
The E5 family also uses Intel’s Turbo Boost 2.0 technology, which enables cores to ramp up their clock speed if it is being used heavily while others are under less strain. Similarly, Dynamic Switching means the machine can detect when the load is too high or low and switch resources around as needed.
For security, the E5 family uses what Intel calls Advanced Encryption Standard New Instruction, which enables systems to encrypt and decrypt data running over a range of applications and transactions.
Pawlowski said that security is "one of the biggest concerns for Intel and its customers." Having security "inside the machine means its hidden from he outside world and is more secure," he added.
The product is available now and has in fact been out in the wild for a while now. CBR spoke to one vendor at today’s launch event who claimed that the new processors offered "unbelievable" performance improvements, particularly when it came to memory bandwidth.
Last week Dell announced its new range of PowerEdge Servers, based on the Xeon E5 family. HP has also unveiled a new server line using Intel’s new processor. Other manufacturers such as Asus, Acer, IBM, Cisco, Oracle and Hitachi are also expected to announce new products that will use the Xeon E5.
The Xeon E5-2600 product family will be offered with 17 different parts which range in price from $198 to $2,050, says Intel.
