14 DAY TRIAL // In March of this year, Intel has started shipping its fastest Xeon processor to date, the 4.4GHz clocked X5698, and now, more than four months after the original announcement, the CPU has started to make its way into server systems.
The first companies to build machines around this fast Xeon chip are Dell, which started selling the PowerEdge R710 rack mount server, and HP that is offering it in the ProLiant DL380 G7.
The PowerEdge R710 is currently available only in China, where it has a starting price of approximately $24,300 USD. For this much money, users get a single Xeon X5698 processor, 6GB of RAM and a 300GB hard drive.
The second machine to be powered by this processor, HP's ProLiant DL380 G7, starts at a steeper $43,842 price, but it offers its users two X5698 CPUs, which are paired together with 4GB of RAM and a SATA DVD-RW optical drive.
All these are packed inside a server enclosure with a pair of 750W power supplies, but no storage drives are supplied.
The Intel Xeon X5698 processor is based on the Westmere architecture, but, unlike most of its counterparts, it comes with four of the six cores disabled, making it the only CPU in the Xeon 5600 series to feature a dual-core design.
Otherwise, the rest of the core has remained pretty much intact and the CPU packs the same 12MB of Level 3 cache memory, while also featuring Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost support.
In addition, the chip also carries dual QPI links, SSE 4.2 and AES-NI instruction support and is compatible with Intel's LGA 1366 socket.
Other features include a tri-channel memory controller that works with DDR3 1066MHz DIMMs, VT-x and Intel TXT support as well as Intel's enhanced SpeedStep technology. The chip's pricing is not known. (via CPU-World)