Intel hits energy-efficient milestone with new processors

Further expanding its quad-core processor family lineup, Intel Corporation on March 12 announced two energy-efficient 50-watt server processors that represent a 35- to nearly 60-percent decrease in power from Intel’s existing 80- and 120-watt quad-core server products.

As companies increasingly focus on reducing electricity bills and cooling costs associated with their computing needs, these new processors, requiring just 12.5 watts of power for each of the four cores or processing engines, deliver similar performance yet set a new standard in energy efficiency.

Intel has introduced 11 server, workstation and desktop PC quad-core processors since November.

Servers based on the new low-power, quad-core processors are designed for dense Internet datacenters, blade servers and industries such as financial services where the scale and density of servers are highly sensitive to power, real estate and cooling costs. The potential for cost savings by replacing aging infrastructure with Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors and deploying virtualization technology can be as much as $6,000 per year over the lifetime of each server based on Intel’s own evaluations.

In addition, these new processors represent a nearly ten-fold improvement in power consumption per core in just 1.5 years. The company attributes this collective success to the merits of its breakthrough Intel Core microarchitecture and aggressive design execution.

“Intel has really responded to the industry’s call to deliver unprecedented breakthroughs for data center energy efficiency,” said Kirk Skaugen, vice president of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group and general manager of the Server Platform Group. “IT managers can get outstanding quad-core Intel Xeon server performance today and at no premium to dual-core products. We are thrilled to drive further records in lower power consumption and we won’t stop here. Our engineers and architects are passionate about delivering even more power-saving innovations down the road.”

Intel is introducing two low-voltage processors: the Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor L5320 and L5310. The new 50-watt quad-core processors operate at 1.86 GHz and 1.60 GHz, respectively, feature a unique 8 megabytes (MB) of on die cache for faster memory data communication and run on dedicated 1066 MHz front side buses. In 1,000 unit quantities the L5320 is priced at $519 and the L5310 at $455.

These processors can be coupled with Intel’s existing “Bensley” server platform and have been designed to be “drop-in” compatible with the existing Dual-Core and Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor families.

Servers based on these new processors are expected to be available worldwide over the next few months from Acer, Dell, Digital Henge, Fujitsu Siemens, HP, HCL, IBM, Rackable Systems, Samsung, Verari, Wipro and other companies.

Intel, the world leader in silicon innovation, develops technologies, products and initiatives to continually advance how people work and live.