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Intel Ships Core Duo-based Xeon
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?"
The inevitable Woodcrest-based Xserves should satisfy those people who only care about performance. Or they could just buy Opteron servers today.
The whole reason people buy clusters instead of a specially built system like Cray's is for the cost. Running a large (hundreds of nodes) cluster costs upwards of tens of thousands a year for electricity and cooling. Energy efficiency is definitely warranted in this case. It's the same reason IBM's BlueGene employs 700 MHz PowerPC processors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Gene