Your servers and data centers are about to get a whole lot faster, if Intel has its way. Intel Tuesday officially launched the Xeon E5 CPU platform, which delivers an 80-percent performance gain over the previous generation of Intel’s server chips.
“The E5 is the heart of the data center,” Diane Bryant vice president and general manager of Intel’s Connected Systems Group said during a press event for the launch of the E5. “Over the past decade, we have seen an over 100x improvement in raw performance.”
While raw performance of the processor is important, Bryant stressed that the E5 also delivers other innovations beyond just raw compute power. One of those innovations is a new instruction set called Advanced Vector Extensions, which can double the amount of floating point operations that a server chip performs.
“The floating point gains target computation intense, workloads whether they are technical computing, medical imaging or media processing,” Bryant said.
Intel is also improving I/O with a new system called Intel Data Direct I/O. Intel Director Nazeem Noordem explained that with the E5, the I/O hub has been directly integrated with the processor.
“With this integration, we have reduced the latency of data traffic by 30 percent, so data gets where it needs to go faster than ever before,” Noordem said.
Read the full story at ServerWatch:
Intel Accelerates Servers with Xeon E5 Chip Launch
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
