Intel Xeon E5 Chips Expected In Early 2012

We have been using Xeon 5600 chips released in the middle of last year. But soon we are going to experience the Xeon E5 chips which are targeted at high performance in computing and cloud providers. It will give significantly high performance than the current Xeon chips as it will be based on Sandy Bridge micro-architecture unlike the current chip which is based on Westmere architecture. The vice president Kiri Skaugen and general manager of Intel’s Data Center group at Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco told that the E5 chip will have 8 processing cores and will be able to run 16 threads per socket. It will be competing with the new server chips based on the Bulldozer architecture from Advanced Micro Devices.



The company already offers E3 Xeon chips based on Sandy Bridge architecture and it also offers Xeon E7 chips, based on the older Westmere architecture, with up to 10 cores for servers with more than four sockets. Intel already has 400 server designs which is almost double that of Xeon 5500 chips that were released in 2009.

The chip also boasts some chip enhancements for Intel for example improved data throughput inside servers while saving power as this time it will be integrating the PCI-Express bus in the microprocessor, as told by Skaugen. He also said that the E5 chips will be able to coexist with the Itanium chips which differ from the Xeon chips mainly due to difference in operating systems. Moreover, the production of new Itanium chip, code-named Poulson, is going to start next year which would deliver double the performance of current Itanium chips.

Intel did not share further details about the E5 chip such as clock speed or backward socket compatibility. Further details about the chip will come at a later date.

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