Intel claims Xeon will pay for itself in eight months

After launching its Xeon 5500 this week, Intel today claimed businesses would see a return on investment in as little as eight months.

Tom Kilroy, vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, said: "With the backdrop of an awful economy some business may like to put off upgrading due to cost but now the cost of doing nothing is fairly substantial."

Intel gave examples of how the Xeon processor within a server could save vast amounts of energy costs while keeping performance levels up.

If a company had 184 Intel Single Core servers from 2005, Intel claim that for a performance refresh you could swap them with 184 Xeon 5500 and have nine times the performance while having an 18 per cent reduction in annual energy cost.

However, if you were happy with your level of performance but wanted to refresh your servers for efficiency, you would only need 21 Xeon 500's to replace the 184 to give the same power and will achieve an estimated 92 per cent annual energy cost reduction with as low as an eight month payback.

Mark Reece, director of development from the London Stock Exchange, which has been using the new processor, said: "Our whole world has changed. In this climate we are fighting for our very business and ROI is critical."

Intel data estimated that 40 per cent traditional IT infrastructure today is made up of single core and a further 40 per cent made up of dual core. With Gartner data showing the majority of cost in IT is spent on maintenance, the suggestion is this upgrade will save you both time and money.