Intel Adds 12.5 Watts Processor to the Xeon 5000 Series

In order to meet the new tendencies of lowering the power consumption in data centers, Intel released new server chips included in the Xeon 5000 series, namely the L5430 and X5270 processors, and the company announced that the fastest of them features a clock speed of 3.5GHz. The L5430 is a low-voltage quad core processor that consumes only 50 watts of power, meaning a total of 12.5 watts per core. As Intel announced, the dual-core Xeon X5270 would require 80 watts of power to operate.

The fast increasing number of data centers as well as the high performance requirements they must meet have a strong impact on their power consumption as well. All the energy needs of a large data center may sometimes equal the amount of power consumed by entire city blocks. Due to such situations, server manufacturers and data center developers are focused on getting as much performance as possible while keeping the power consumption at lower levels. The biggest players in the microprocessor manufacturing industry, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices, have paid a lot of attention to this matter as well.

“Much of the energy efficiency these new processors provide comes from Intel's... 45 (nanometer) manufacturing capability and its reinvented transistors that use a Hafnium-based high-k metal gate formula,” Intel said in a statement. The currently used transistors that have high-k metal gates offer a better control over leakage than the transistors with silicon dioxide gates the company used in the past.

The Xeon 5000 series will also be enriched with processors that have a higher level of power consumption. The high-performance X5492 chip that will be shipped by Intel as well uses as much as 150 watts of energy. Another CPU announced by the chip manufacturer is X5470, which features a 3.33GHz core clock and is said to use 120 watts to operate.

The vendors that are expected to use the new processors in their systems are Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP, IBM, Microstar, Gigabyte, NEC, Quanta, Supermicro, Tyan, Verari Systems, Rackable Systems, and Sun Microsystems. According to Intel, the processors have been developed for such organizations that use workstation and blade and mainstream servers.

The quad-core Xeon L5430 (2.66GHz) processor will be priced at $562, while the quad-core Xeon X5492 (3.4GHz) is expected to cost $1,493. The less consuming X5470 (3.33GHz) would be priced at $1386, while dual core X5270 (3.5GHz) sells for $1172.