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?"

Comments

A start, but no 64-bit? 667 Mhz front-side bus?

[DonChron]

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...

Re:Power efficiency is all good and nice but...

[lsd]

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.

Re:What's new?

[jdb8167]

Two things, SMP and a 34-bit address bus for up to 16GB of RAM.