Intel releases its first six-core processors

Intel has released seven new Xeon chips, each featuring six processing cores.

The new 45nm chips, previously codenamed Dunnington, are part of its Xeon 7400 series of products and are its first to be made up of six cores. This offers the potential for up to 96 cores in a single system, when using 16-socket platforms.

Each chip is supported by 16MB of shared level 2 cache, with clock speeds up to 2.66GHz. Meanwhile power levels for the six-core chips go down to 65 watts, equivalent to 11 watts per core.

Intel said that the new chips are built for running virtualised environments and dealing with demanding workloads, such as databases, business intelligence and enterprise resource planning (ERP) and claims performance increases of up to 50 per cent in some cases over previous generation chips.

"This new processor series helps IT manage increasingly complex enterprise server environments, providing a great opportunity to boost the scalable performance of multi-threaded applications within a stable platform infrastructure," said Tom Kilroy, Intel vice president and general manager of its Digital Enterprise Group.

The chip company said that the Xeon 7400 series has already broken performance records in key industry benchmarks, including an all-time high result for four-socket servers of 684,508 tpmC on the TPC-C benchmark, which measures database performance in an online transaction processing environment. This was achieved on an IBM System 3850 M2 server, recently reviewed by IT PRO.

Pricing for the Xeon 7000 sequence processors in quantities of 1,000 was given as ranging from $856 (3481.76) to $2,729 (1,535).

Intel also recently launched four halogen-free Xeon processors as part of Xeon 5400 series.