Technology
Written by Alma Anonas-Carpio / Correspondent
Sunday, 12 April 2009 18:07

A SMALLER, faster and more power-efficient processor chip for servers is now available in the country, Intel Philippines announced as it launched the 45-nanometer (nm) Xeon processor 5500 series.

Speaking before the press at a briefing in Makati City recently, Intel Philippines country manager Ricky Banaag said the new Xeon processors are the chipmaker’s “most revolutionary server processors since addressing the market with the Intel Pentium Pro processor almost 15 years ago.”

Based on product information provided by Intel, the new Xeon processors “can automatically adjust to specified energy usage levels and speed data center transactions and customer database queries.” These new enterprise-class processors earlier codenamed “Nehalem-EP,” are also expected to “play a key role in scientific discoveries by researchers who use supercomputers as their foundation for research… while delivering great energy efficiency for reduced electricity costs.”

The Xeon 5500 series chips offer several Intel-developed “breakthrough technologies that radically improve system speed and versatility,” Banaag said. One such breakthrough feature is called “turbo-boost,” a system by which the four-core chip monitors usage and shuts down unused processor cores while optimizing the performance of the remaining active core or cores.

These processors are seen as “the foundation for the next decade of innovation,” according to a press statement issued by Intel vice president and the company’s digital enterprise group general manager Patrick Gelsinger. “These chips showcase groundbreaking advances in performance virtualization and workload management, which will create opportunities to solve the world’s most complex challenges and push the limits of science and technology.”

The new Xeon chips are also the smallest server processors in their class, built using the same technology that created the Atom—Intel’s tiniest processor, which is used in the Internet-centric ultramobile PCs that are now driving up demand for mobile computers among consumers. And they will get smaller, Banaag said, as Intel works toward producing even tinier 32-nm chips for both consumer personal computers and server use.

The Xeon 5500 processors are designed to meet what Intel executives said is the “rising demand for high-performance computing (HPC) performance. Banaag noted that the “HPC segment” Intel is targeting “is constantly seeking the best performance in a variety of scientific areas, including human discovery, outer space, basic building blocks of matter, disease and weather prediction. In all of these cases, the Xeon 5500 series processor-based platforms will allow the computing industry to move PetaFLOPS-class machines that will enable a new era of discovery and invention. PetaFLOPS are defined as a measure of computer processing speed wherein the computations are expressed at a rate of “a quadrillion (one thousand trillion) floating points per second.”

* Published in BusinessMirror