Intel® Xeon® Processor 5600 Series Delivers Efficiency and Performance

fact sheet Vendor: Intel Corporation (www.intel.com) Vendor's Information: About Intel Corporation

As data centers reach the upper limits of their power and cooling capacity, efficiency has become the focus of extending the life of existing data centers and designing new ones. As part of these efforts, IT departments need to refresh existing infrastructure with standard enterprise servers that deliver more performance and scalability, more efficiently.

Research by Intel and others found that upgrading to multi-core servers with higher performing, more efficient processors can accelerate data center ROI, saving on power and cooling, space, labor, and software licensing costs. By refreshing IT infrastructure with more energy-efficient systems, companies gain capacity to grow and to increase IT performance, reduce energy costs by 95 percent, and realize ROI in five months.

The Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 series delivers the same performance as previous-generation servers but uses up to 30 percent less power. And data centers can achieve up to a 95 percent reduction in energy costs when consolidating their single-core infrastructure with a new infrastructure built on Intel Xeon processor 5600.

The Intel Xeon processor 5600 series creates these savings by automatically regulating power consumption and intelligently adjusting server performance according to application needs, maximizing both energy efficiency and performance. The secret to this compelling combination is Intel's 32nm Nehalem microarchitecture. It features Intel Intelligent Power Technology that automatically shifts the CPU and memory into the lowest available power state, while delivering the performance applications need.

A number of innovative technologies help the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series deliver intelligent performance. Intel Turbo Boost Technology works with Intel Intelligent Power Technology to deliver performance on demand, letting processors operate above the rated frequency to speed specific workloads and reduce power consumption during low utilization periods.

Intel Hyper-Threading Technology benefits from larger caches and massive memory bandwidth, delivering greater throughput and responsiveness for multi-threaded applications.

Intel QuickPath Technology and an integrated memory controller speed traffic between processors and I/O controllers for bandwidth intensive applications, delivering up to 4.4x the bandwidth for technical computing.

The intelligent performance of the Intel Xeon processor 5600 series also gives IT fine-grained manual control to adapt to changing priorities or to meet service-level agreements (SLAs). For example, Intel Intelligent Power Technology enables policy-based control that allows processors to operate at optimal frequency and power. The operating systems can make this determination automatically, or administrators can designate which applications require high-frequency processing and which should be executed at lower frequencies to conserve power.

Expand the Benefits of Virtualization

Intel Xeon processor 5600 series can also help tame server sprawl by providing up to 15:1 consolidation capacity. It expands the benefits of virtualization beyond consolidation with innovations that can help boost performance, increase consolidation ratios, and enable servers of different generations to be combined in the same virtualized server pool, improving virtual machine failover, load balancing, and disaster recovery capabilities. With more performance in the same power envelope, IT managers can use virtualization to deliver high-availability solutions with the flexibility to address disaster recovery and real-time workload balancing so the business can respond to the expected and the unexpected.

Intel Xeon processor 5600 series with next-generation Intel Virtualization Technology (Intel VT) enhances virtualization performance by up to 3.5x and reduces roundtrip virtualization latency by up to 2x. Intel VT-x continues to offer investment protection and infrastructure flexibility with multigeneration VM migration across the full range of 32-bit and 64-bit configurations, enabling bigger VM pools.

Intel Virtualization Technology for Connectivity (Intel VT-c) provides hardware-assisted I/O that accelerates network performance and simplifies VM migration. Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (Intel VT-d) helps speed data movement and eliminates much of the performance overhead by giving designated VMs their own dedicated I/O devices, reducing the overhead of the VM migration in managing I/O traffic.

Improved Security Features

As enterprises become borderless, security attacks rise – from DoS to phising to malware to data leakage. This keeps security challenges foremost in the minds of IT staff. And with the mixed environment in most data centers, servers are anything but secure. Intel Xeon processor 5600 series has two new security features that help you secure your data by speeding up data encryption and protecting against software attacks at launch.

Data encryption is not new, but new AES instructions from Intel are. In the past, data encryption either required custom hardware, such as security appliances and HDDs, or took away from CPU performance to manage. But with Intel AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) Technology, you get robust encryption without needing additional appliances or increased performance overhead. In fact, AES-NI improves CPU performance for encryption by as much as a 52 percent for secure Internet transactions, and allows for broader use of encryption throughout the data center.

Intel Trusted Execution Technology (Intel TXT) addresses a critical security need for all server deployments, especially virtualized and cloud-based use models by helping protect your server prior to OS launch or hypervisior launch. Intel TXT complements other malware protections such as anti-virus and intrusion detection to help ensure that only trusted software is on the platform. VMs on trusted platforms are also protected, so you can easily migrate them onto other trusted platforms or create pools of platforms with trusted hypervisors. Intel Xeon processor 5600 series helps future proof your data center with improved security features for evolving usage models.

In a recent survey, 42 percent of data center owners said they would exceed power capacity within the next 12 to 24 months, and 39 percent said they would exceed cooling capacity in the same timeframe. Data centers are paying the price for decades of IT build-out that resulted in server sprawl and escalating system management costs.

With up to 15x the performance compared to installed single-core servers and its unique virtualization capabilities, Intel Xeon processor 5600 series lets organizations deliver more business results from every clock cycle, every IT man-hour, watt, and inch of data center space. Its lower TCO and groundbreaking performance offers the opportunity to build a more competitive business and transform the economics of the data center.

Visit the Intel Resource Center to learn about the benefits of the new Xeon Processors »