New Quad-Core Xeons Are Arriving

Sounds just like a commercial now, doesn't it? Well, perhaps there is a commercial purpose in all INTEL's struggle to compete as effectively as it can against the invasion of Opterons into the server area. And while Netburst-based Xeons did little against it, Woodcrests and Clovertons (which are Core 2 based) can be a lot more effective especially due to their superior performance in clock/clock benchmarks.

INTEL has recently announced that it is planning to update its entire 51xx and 53xx Xeon line with the introduction of a new core stepping. Cloverton quad-cores will jump from B-3 revision to G-0 revision while Woodcrest dual-cores will receive the same update from revision B-2 to G-0. All these updates are related to virtualization performance and energy efficiency since these are some of the areas where Opterons still rule.

G-0 revision will update the following products: X5355, E5345, E5335, E5320, E5310, L5320, L5310 (Clovertown, quad-core) and 5160, 5150, LV 5148, 5140, 5130, LV 5138, 5120, LV 5128, 5110 (Woodcrest, dual-core). As all of these CPUs will switch to the new revision, they will also receive some minor improvements such as APIC Task Priority Register (TPR) Virtualization, NMI-window exiting and Advanced VM-exit information for INS & OUTS.

Due to the fact that both Woodcrests and Clovertons will receive a revision update they will also change their CPUID. The Clovertown CPUID will be updated from 06F7 to 06FB while Woodcrests will jump from 06F6 to 06FB. As a natural consequence, the sSpec number of these CPUs will also change. In order to properly use them onto a LGA-771 motherboard, users will have to update their BIOSes to the latest firmware. Due to the fact that INTEL has only introduced some minor improvements into the op-code of these CPUs, prices for the new models will be comparable to current price tags for the reference CPUs.

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