IDF: Intel's Larrabee Makes a Quiet Debut - Page 2

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Low-power Xeons and mini-servers

The Xeon, long a staple of big iron servers, is working its way further down the food chain. The company announced two new Xeon 3400 processors, which are part of the low-end of the Xeon line. They will come in 30 watt and 45 watt configurations.

"It wasn't too long ago that we were squeezing 30 watts into ugly notebooks. So fitting 30 watts into this category is an amazing thing," said Maloney. Intel also announced a new "micro server" reference design for making small, very low power servers using the new Xeons.

"The time is right to push ahead and create a new segment. We see very much the need to create this new category. It won't replace old servers, it will augment them," said Maloney.

Intel also formally introduced "Jasper Forest," a Xeon chip designed specifically for the embedded networking and communications markets. The chip comes with integrated PCI Express 2.0, virtualization, a non-transparent bridge and RAID 6 to create essentially a system-on-a-chip design but for high-end embedded designs.

Maloney's speech also covered the very high end, which entailed the Itanium and Nehalem-EX processor. He reaffirmed Intel's commitment to the chip, which has settled into its own niche, stating that there were three more generations of product planned and that Tukwila, the quad-core design, is due for the first quarter of 2010.

But Nehalem-EX, the eight-core product, received the lion's share of talk. Maloney noted that it shares a lot of technologies with Itanium, like the QuickPath Interconnect, the same memory hub, the same I/O hub, and shared RAS (reliability, availability, scalability) features.

Nehalem-EX is aimed at the eight socket and up market, which isn't a big market, but it is an expensive one. "A lot of people say there's no demand here. We think there is a tremendous demand for application performance in this segment, and we will see more energy going in from this," said Maloney.

He promised 15 new designs with eight or more processors in both scalable rack mounted and blade designs. A server like that could handle 128 threads and 2TB of memory.

Maloney also discussed Westmere-EP, which will replace the current generation of 45nm Nehalem-EP Xeon 5500 processors. Like the rest of the Westmere family, these new processors will use 32nm process designs, the second generation of Intel's high-k metal gate materials to reduce heat, offer improved energy efficiency, 10GbE, and enhanced security.

He also mentioned the next generation of vPro will come with the Westmere family and feature anti-theft technology, active remote management support and integrated KVM (keyboard, video and mouse) support.