Intel has officially launched its latest Nehalem-based Xeon processors, the single-socket 3500 and dual-socket 5500 series for servers and workstations.
While the announcement may seem a bit stale in light of all the hubbub about the desktop Xeons such as the latest Mac Pros and the Lenovos D20 and S20 offering Nvidia Quadro or ATI FirePro graphics, and Nvidia's Tesla C1060 GPU co-processor platform.
CNet reports that fresh announcements are due today from the bigger server suppliers, among them IBM. "If you thoroughly maximize the capabilities of Nehalem, generation to generation you can get something like two times the performance capability," said Alex Yost, vice president IBM BladeCenter.
According to Mercury News, HP yesterday launched 11 products incorporating Xeon 5500 chips, including blade servers, rack servers and tower servers.
When asked where these new releases would leave AMD's Shanghai server processor, Intel’s Pat Gelsinger told the Financial Times that Intel sees Nehalem having a huge impact on AMD's four-socket business.
"The performance gains we showed over the previous 5400 processor, all 30 of them are new two-socket records, and every one of those benchmarks bar one beats the four-socket Shanghai," explained Gelsinger. "We see Nehalem having a much bigger impact on their four-socket business than our own four-socket one," he concluded.
The launch of Intel’s Xeon processors comes in the middle of the company’s legal battle with Nvidia over the its new line of processors. Intel doesn’t believe that Nvidia has the right to design integrated memory controllers. Intel filed a lawsuit back in February which stated that the chipset license agreement the two companies signed four years ago does not extend to its future generation CPUs with integrated memory controllers.
The new processors are now shipping for $188 to $1,600 for the Xeon 5500 and $284 to $999 for the Xeon 3500. Hit up the press release for the full scoop.
Reminder: Intel will hold tech talks on its Nehalem-based Xeon processors this Thursday and Friday, April 2nd and 3rd 10 am - 12 noon PDT. Tom's Hardware will be doing a countdown to the two events starting at 9 am PDT.
