Intel on Tuesday launched its Xeon 5600 processor series, calling it the "most secure data center processor" ever. They’re also pretty powerful, having been built on Intel’s 32nm Gulftown architecture. Already several enterprise vendors have touted the new chips.
"The performance of the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series is so compelling that it’s absolutely justifiable immediately in terms of ROI, to simply replace Legacy service, a whole rack of servers, or whatever it happens to be with a single platform. We did it ourselves for our own IT workloads and reduced 264 servers to 16 and in the process got high availability and agility as a result," said Simon Crosby, CTO, Data Center & Cloud, Citrix Systems.
The new chips — which range in power from a 1.86GHz quad-core to a 3.33GHz six-core and 3.46GHz quad-core — add a couple of new security features, including Intel Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (Intel AES-NI) and Intel Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT). The result, says Intel, is faster encryption and decryption performance for more secure transactions and virtualized environments.
According to Intel, a two-socket server using the new low-voltage Xeon L5640 will deliver the same performance as a server using the previous generation’s champ, the Xeon X5570.
Much more here.
Image Credit: Intel
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