Intel Xeon 7300 quad-core processor launched

7 September, 2007

Intel Corporation has officially announced its new, four-socket, quad-core Xeon 7300 Series, code-named Tigerton.

The announcement comes just five days before Advanced Micro Devices Incorporated (AMD) is to introduce its quad-core processor Barcelona.

According to Intel Corporation, based in Santa Clara, California, the United States, compared with the its previous-generation four-socket, dual-core products, the Xeon 7300 series processors pack more than twice the performance and more than three times the performance per watt – and at the same price.

The Xeon 7300 completes Intel’s transition to Core microarchitecture, a move that Intel first announced in June 2006.

Intel intends to move users away from the phased-out, single-core processors onto the quad-core platform, saying that the Intel Xeon 7300 is designed for server consolidation. The Xeon 7300 has four times the memory capacity of the previous generation: a four-socket, dual-core code-named Tulsa.

Kirk Skaugen, Intel’s vice-president and general manager of the Server Products Group, explains: “We are not charging a premium for quad-core, so all of our dual-core processor pricing is replaced with quad-core prices. We have eliminated every reason not to go to quad core. Many users have single-core servers that are utilised only 15% to 20%. Now we have a platform with five times the performance of single core, so you can take dozens of underutilised systems, create virtual partitions and increase utilisation dramatically.”

The more energy-efficient Xeon 7300 series includes frequencies up to 2.93 GHz at 130 watts; several 80-watt processors; as well as a 50-watt version, or 12.5 watts per core, with a frequency of 1.86 GHz for ultradense deployments, such as four-socket blade servers.

It is also possible to upgrade the Xeon 7300 to Intel’s next-generation chips. Code-named Dunnington, the 45-nanometre (nm) processor with four or more cores is due to be released in 2008.

In mid-2008, Intel plans to ship its Nehalem family of processors, which will include one to eight cores per product. In 2009, Intel plans to introduce its 32-nm manufacturing process.

In addition, the Xeon 7300 includes a new Data Traffic Optimizations feature that enhances data movement between processors, memory and I/O connections. While previously an interconnect was shared, now each processor will have its own interconnect, Kirk Skaugen said.

Intel VT FlexMigration, announced previously, will assist in the seamless upgrade of virtual machines to Intel’s next-generation 45-nm Core microarchitecture-based platforms.

VMware Incorporated of Palo Alto, California, and Intel Corporation worked together to optimise VMware ESX Server on the Xeon 7300 for live migration with VMotion between Intel processor families. This means that users with Intel Xeon processors can perform live migrations of virtual machines to servers with future-generation Intel processors.

However, users cannot do live migrations between AMD and Intel-based servers.