Intel price lists: Xeon 2MB L2, global price cut

Early this week Intel expanded its Xeon server series for one- and two-way configurations. The new Xeons based on the N0 stepping (Irwindale, CPUID = 0F43h) don´t differ much from the previous E0 stepping (Nocona): actually it´s just the L2 that was doubled (2MB now). Therefore all the innovations of earlier steppings (EM64T, XD-Bit, Thermal Monitor 2, C1E, DBS, SSE3, Hyper-Threading, etc.) are present in the novelties as well.

The increased amount of transistors in Irwindale core (plus additional 1MB L2) resulted in up to 18% performance boost in certain applications comparing to Nocona-based solutions, according to Intel. Still it negatively affected the energy consumption: at the same 90nm process, and 800MHz bus, N0 Xeons consume 110W instead of 103W (E0). The new processors are packed into usual 604-pin PPGA packages. The pricing policy is as follows:

* sSpec is available here

In Japan they already showcase two-way systems on the new 3.4 GHz Xeon processors, which normally operate on Supermicro X6DAE-G2 motherboard (E7525 chipset; Irwindale is also claimed to work with E7320 and E7520).

Japanese version of SiSoftware Sandra still makes mistakes determining Irwindale specs (e.g. the core name), but 2MB L2 are clearly visble:

The list of vendors which are going to ship systems on the new Xeon processors includes IBM, NEC, HP, and 14 smaller companies, including Hitachi and Fujitsu. For sale novelties will be available (in Japan) early in March.

Besides the processors, Intel announced the Intel IOP333 I/O chip on Intel XScale architecture. The novelty allows to build RAID 6 storage systems. The company also mentioned the new Xeon MP processors (Potomac core with 8MB L3 and entry-level Cranford core with 2MB L2) to be introduced within three months.

Source: PC Watch

Write a comment below. No registration needed!