Intel beats AMD to market again with quad-core server chips

By Colleen Taylor, Contributing Editor -- 9/6/2007

Wednesday marked the official debut of Intel Corp.'s quad-core processors designed for multi-processor (MP) servers.  The quad-core Xeon 7300 series processors, which had been code-named "Caneland," have been shipping to customers since June; however, the official larger-scale launch this week solidifies the availability of quad-core architecture through all of Intel's processor product lines.  

This launch comes less than a week before Intel's rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is believed to be unveiling its first quad-core processor offering, codenamed "Barcelona." Diane Bryant, VP and general manager of Intel's server group, told Electronic News that Intel perceived its competition as "still struggling away" to catch up with Intel's achievements. Intel first debuted its quad-core Xeon 5300 in November 2006.

The six new Xeon 7300 series processors purportedly deliver more than twice the performance and more than three times the performance per watt over the company's previous generation dual-core products. The series includes frequencies up to 2.93GHz at 130 watts, several 80-watt processors and a 50-watt version with a frequency of 1.86GHz. Intel said that the 7300 series and Intel 7300 chipset offer up to four times the memory capacity, up to 256 GBytes RAM, of Intel's previous MP platforms.

Virtualization was undoubtedly the key word for the Caneland launch: Intel said that with the introduction of the Xeon 7300, users will be able to pool all of their Intel Core microarchitecture based server resources, whether they are single-, dual- or multi-processor based, into a dynamic virtual server infrastructure that allows live virtual machine migration. Bryant said that Intel's cooperation and investment into virtualization startup VMware has led Intel to tailor the new processors to be virtualization-optimized.

Starting Wednesday, servers based on the Xeon 7300 series processors are expected to be announced by more than 50 system manufacturers, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Sun, and Fujitsu. 

Pricing of the new quad-core processors depends on the speeds, features and amount ordered, ranging from $856 to $2,301 in quantities of 1,000.

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