Intel Delivers 8-core Nehalem Xeon

April 2, 2010

Intel wraps up its high end server line with the latest crop of 45nm Nehalem-based Xeon 7500 microprocessors that deliver up to 3 times the performance of previous chips.

William G. Wong

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8-core, 16-thread Xeon 7500

Intel's latest 8-core, 16-thread Xeon 7500 line delivers 3 times the performance of previous platforms. It is designed for systems from 2 to 256 chips and is based on the 45nm Nehalem architecture. New servers to feature 4x more memory with up to 1 Terabyte in 4-processor configuration. There is a corresponding 8x increase in memory bandwidth.

The Xeon 7500 employs the new QuickPath high speed serial interconnect. The 8-core system also supports Turbo Boost. Threads that operate in performance state P0 allow a core to operate at the maximum frequency allowing and operating system to balance speed with power consumption and corresponding heat generation. The upper limit of the Turbo Boost is set based on the number of active cores, estimated current and power consumption and the processor temperature. This combination is critical in dense server settings such as blade servers.

The Xeon 7500 is also the first Xeon processor to support the Machine Check Architecture (MCA) Recovery that was only available in the Intel Itanium processor family. This feature allows the processor to work with the operating system and virtual machine manager to recover from otherwise fatal system errors.

Pricing ranges from $1980 to $3692. The chips have a 103W TDP.

Intel

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

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