SANTA CLARA, March 6 -- Addressing the incredible growth of data traffic in the cloud, Intel Corporation announced the record-breaking Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family. These new processors deliver leadership performance, best data center performance per watt^1,4, breakthrough I/O innovation and trusted hardware security features to enable IT to scale. These processors are not only at the heart of servers and workstations, but will also power the next generation of storage and communication systems from leading vendors around the world.

Forecasts call for 15 billion connected devices⁵ and over 3 billion connected users⁶ by 2015. The amount of global data center IP traffic is forecasted to grow by 33 percent annually through 2015, surpassing 4.8 zetabytes per year, more than 3 times the amount in 2011⁶. At these levels, each connected user will generate more than 4GB of data traffic every day – the equivalent of a 4-hour HD movie. This will increase the amount of data that needs to be stored by almost 50 percent per year⁷. ^­ In order to scale to meet this growth, the worldwide number of cloud servers is expected to more than triple by 2015⁸.

“The growth in cloud computing and connected devices is transforming the way businesses benefit from IT products and services,” said Diane Bryant, Intel vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group. “For businesses to capitalize on these innovations, the industry must address unprecedented demand for efficient, secure and high-performing datacenter infrastructure.  The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family is designed to address these challenges by offering unparalleled, balanced performance across compute, storage and network, while reducing operating costs.” 

The key requirements to enable IT to scale are performance, energy efficiency, I/O bandwidth and security. With the best combination of performance, built-in capabilities and cost-effectiveness, the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product families are designed to address these requirements, and become the heart of the next-generation data center powering servers, storage and communication systems.

Leadership Performance with Best Data Center Performance per Watt

Supporting up to eight cores per processor and up to 768GB of system memory, the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family increases performance by up to 80 percent^1,2 compared to the previous-generation Intel^® Xeon^® processor 5600 series. The family also supports Intel^® Advanced Vector Extension (Intel^® AVX) that increases the performance on compute-intensive applications such as financial analysis, media content creation and high performance computing up to 2 times⁹.

Additional built-in technologies such as Intel® Turbo Boost Technology 2.0, Intel Hyper-Threading Technology and Intel® Virtualization Technology provide IT with flexible capabilities to increase the performance of their infrastructure dynamically. These performance advances have led the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family to capture 15¹⁰ new dual socket x86 world records.

Modern data centers must improve the raw performance they deliver, but also do so efficiently by reducing power consumption and operating costs. The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family continue Intel’s focus on reducing total cost of ownership by improving energy efficient performance more than 50 percent^1,4 as measured by SPECpower_ssj*2008 compared to the previous generation Intel Xeon processor 5600 series.  These processors offer support for tools to monitor and control power usage such as Intel® Node Manager and Intel® Data Center Manager, which provide accurate, real-time power and thermal data to system management consoles. In addition, Intel’s leadership performance allows IT managers to meet their growing demands while optimizing software license and capital costs.

I/O Innovation and Network Capabilities

With the unprecedented growth in data traffic it is essential that systems not only improve computational abilities, but also enable data to flow faster to support data-hungry applications and increase the bandwidth within the data center. The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family meets these needs with Intel^® Integrated I/O (Intel^®IIO) and Intel^® Data Direct I/O (Intel^® DDIO). Intel^® DDIO allows Intel Ethernet controllers and adapters to route I/O traffic directly to processor cache, reducing trips to system memory reducing power consumption and I/O latency. The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family is also the first server processors to integrate the I/O controller supporting PCI Express* 3.0 directly into the microprocessor. This integration reduces latency up to 30 percent¹¹ compared to prior generations and with PCI Express* 3.0 can up to triple³ the movement of data into and out of the processor.

The high-performance processing power along with Intel^® Integrated I/O and advanced storage features such as PCIe* non-transparent bridging and asynchronous DRAM refresh, makes the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family also an ideal choice for storage and communications solutions.

Increasing bandwidth demands driven by server virtualization and data and storage network consolidation have led to strong growth in 10 Gigabit Ethernet deployments, with adapter port shipments exceeding 1 million units in each quarter of 2011¹³. Today’s announcement of the Intel^® Ethernet Controller X540 demonstrates Intel’s commitment to driving 10 Gigabit Ethernet to the mainstream by reducing implementation costs. This industry-first single-chip 10GBASE-T solution is designed for low-cost, low-power LAN on motherboard (LOM) and includes flexible I/O Virtualization and Unified networking support at no additional cost.

Trusted Security

The Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family reaffirms Intel’s commitment to providing a more secure hardware foundation for today’s data centers. Intel® Advanced Encryption Standard New Instruction (Intel^® AES-NI¹⁴) helps systems to quickly encrypt and decrypt data running over a range of applications and transactions. Intel® Trusted Execution Technology (Intel^® TXT¹⁵) creates a trusted foundation to reduce the infrastructure exposure to malicious attacks. These features in partnership with leading software applications will help IT protect their data centers against attack and scale to meet the demands of their customers.

Extensive Industry Support

Starting today, system manufacturers from around the world are expected to announce hundreds of Intel^® Xeon^® processor E5 family-based platforms. These manufacturers include Acer*, Appro*, Asus*, Bull*, Cisco*, Dell*, Fujitsu*, HP*, Hitachi*, Huawei*, IBM*, Inspur*, Lenovo*, NEC*, Oracle*, Quanta*, SGI*, Sugon*, Supermicro* and Unisys*.

Product, Pricing Details

The Xeon processor E5-2600 product family will be offered with 17 different parts which range in price from $198 to $2,050 in quantities of 1,000. Additionally three single-socket Intel Xeon processor E5-1600 parts will be offered for workstations which range in price from $284 to $1,080. Complete pricing details can be found in the Intel Newsroom. For more details on these new Intel Xeon processors, visitwww.intel.com/xeon. For more details on world records and other claims, visitwww.intel.com/performance/server/.

About Intel

Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) is a world leader in computing innovation. The company designs and builds the essential technologies that serve as the foundation for the world’s computing devices. Additional information about Intel is available atnewsroom.intel.com and blogs.intel.com.  

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Source: Intel