Reach for the cloud
It's easy to take Intel's rate of innovation for granted, but it has been an especially busy start to 2010 for the chip giant. We has the new range of 32 nm consumer CPUs and that was followed a couple of weeks ago by the new 32 nm server processor - the Xeon 5600 series.
Yesterday Intel launched its CPU for higher-end servers, with the proprietary, RISC market very much the target. The Xeon 7500 series - codenamed Nehalem EX - is being hailed by Intel as the largest performance leap in Intel Xeon history. It is a 45 nm parts, but we were assured there will be a Westmere EX in due course.
The new CPUs offer up to eight cores and can be used in platforms that support 256 chips per system. The platform brings a 4x increase in memory capacity and an 8x increase in memory bandwidth.
The launch event in London was attended by Intel's worldwide head of enterprise marketing - Shannon Poulin (pictured). "The product we're launching today is really a game-changer from our perspective," he said. Intel was supported by HP and, tellingly, IBM at the event, as well as financial trading company Nomura.
At the end of the event we chatted to Richard Curran, Intel's EMEA director of enterprise. He spoke about the datacentre market - at which the Xeon 7500 series is aimed - and pointed to the explosion in web-based content and services available to an ever-expanding range of connected devices, not to mention cloud computing, as evidence of the market potential for this launch.
We mentioned we had been at the AMD server launch the previous day and Curran questioned our estimate of Opteron market share, saying it's more like six rather than ten percent. He also stressed that offering more cores is only beneficial if the software is able to take advantage of them.
It looks like the global recession has given the x86 server market a big boost compared to the proprietary market, as companies have been attracted by the ability to grow their server infrastructure incrementally, rather than having to splash-out on a new complete solution.
