Intel Xeon Processor 5100 Series Unveiled by Intel

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Intel Corporation unveils its dual-core Intel Xeon Processor 5100 series, codenamed "Woodcrest", for the high-volume server, workstation, communications, storage and embedded market segments. The processors are based on the Intel Core Microarchitecture. More than 200 server and workstation models are planned from more than 150 manufacturers with initial orders starting the moment of the announcement. The new dual-core server processors are the first to take advantage of Intel's Core microarchitecture, a power-sensitive blueprint design that also includes several innovations to dramatically improve performance.

The Dual-Core Intel Xeon Processor 5100 series delivers up to 135 percent performance improvements and up to 40 percent reduction in energy consumption over previous Intel server products. It also outshines competitive offerings in dozens of real-world applications and industry standard benchmarks. This blend of power and efficiency enables equipment manufacturers to optimally balance processing capabilities within power and space constraints of smaller-sized systems that are typical of communications, storage and embedded applications.

Based on Intel's 65-nanometer manufacturing process that further shrinks transistors and power consumption, yet also boosts speed, the 5100 series is "drop-in compatible" as part of Intel's "Bensley Platform" and available across a variety of server product segments. The Bensley platform delivers the latest server technologies, including faster and more reliable memory technology called FB-DIMMs, Intel Virtualization Technology, Intel Active Server Manager and Intel I/O Acceleration Technology.

Intel is going to ship the 5100 series at frequencies up to 3.0 gigahertz speed and faster 1333 megahertz front side bus and 4 megabytes of shared L2 cache or memory reservoir between both cores. The 3 GHz version will ship with a Thermal Design Point (TDP) of 80 watts with all others rated at just 65W. An even lower voltage version will ship in the third quarter at 2.33 GHz and a TDP of just 40 watts. Woodcrest includes extreme power management techniques which drives substantially lower actual or measured at the wall power than the maximum or TDP power.

The microarchitecture will power these new processors and also be the foundation for Intel's upcoming mobile and desktop products branded as Intel Core 2 Duo processors. Some of the many new innovations for this multicore-optimized architecture include Intel Wide Dynamic Execution that delivers more instructions per cycle. Every execution core is wider, allowing each core to complete up to four full instructions simultaneously using an efficient 14-stage pipeline for improved and more efficient data transferring, and thus performance.

The processors also include Intel Advanced Smart Cache that allows one of two processing units - or cores - to use the entire memory reservoir if necessary while the other is idle and Intel Smart Memory Access that can "hide" memory latency and bottlenecks. Combined, these Intel-based servers can reduce real estate-associated costs and space, cooling requirements and electrical demand in server data centers for IT managers while increasing responsiveness, productivity and server uptime.

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