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Intel Ships Core Duo-based Xeon

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the new-chips dept.

diegocgteleline.es writes "According to The Register, Intel has begun shipping a power-efficient dual-core "Xeon LV" and claims that it consumes no more than 31 W running at 2 Ghz, with a 667 Mhz frontside bus and sharing 2 MB of L2 between the two cores. The new chip has "four times the performance-per-Watt of its existing 2.8GHz LV Xeon CPU", not surprising given how slow and power inefficient those CPUs were. While this looks like a move to make AMD shares continue yesterday's tendency, it looks like Intel is starting to catching up?"

6 of 45 comments (clear)

  1. Finally, some competition by Btarlinian · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Intel has been losing so much market share in the server space recently. Maybe now they will be able to recover a little. Although, I'm not sure if this will compare to AMD's top offerings.

  2. Power efficiency is all good and nice but... by dc29A · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This CPU is crippled by a shared 667 mhz bus while the Opteron isn't.

    1. Re:Power efficiency is all good and nice but... by 2nd+Post! · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yes, but isn't this also true of the other Core Duo solutions that happen to be equivalent in performance to Athlon/Opeteron CPUs?

      --

      GPL Deconstructed
    2. Re:Power efficiency is all good and nice but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      You have to trust that these guys know what they're doing. It's fast enough now, and they've got legroom to keep the upgrades (cash) coming in. Intentionally crippling chips has been going on since the celerons. In this case though, they're in the enviable position of being able to cripple on of their flagship products.

      I'm looking forward to AMDs response to these impressive (at least in the preview) chips.

    3. Re:Power efficiency is all good and nice but... by lsd · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not exactly. On a single CPU system it makes little difference, but on 2 CPUs and up, the Opteron's NUMA architecture based on multiple memory controllers and high-speed point-to-point links between CPUs, each of which is quicker than the 667Mhz that these Core Duo-based Xeons will share for all memory access and cross-CPU traffic, is a huge win. As you can imagine, that win only increases when you move up to even larger systems.

  3. A start, but no 64-bit? 667 Mhz front-side bus? by DonChron · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Intel's going to have to do a lot more than this to catch up to AMD in the server space. This is an improvement in power consumption, but they're still gated by the front-side-bus architecture which only gets more crowded as you add processors. And 32-bit only... they must really be feeling the heat (lack of heat?) from the Opteron to release a new 32-bit server processor when mature 64-bit OS's and applications are available. Even Microsoft x86-64 Windows and SQL Server products have been out for months, while x86-64 Linux and Linux apps have been out for years.

    It looks like they're desperate to show some progress...