Server Trends: Intel Xeon 5500 Creates New Server Differentiation

Every new processor introduced comes with significant hype. The Intel Xeon 5500 may indeed live up to the hype; it not only provides a faster server processor option but also enables a greater level of differentiation for the server and storage vendor partners that will utilize this processor. For enterprise IT infrastructure and operations professionals, this means a broader and better set of choices. While performance improvements of the 5500 in themselves are impressive, there is just as much to like in the new memory and input/output (I/O) architectures and power efficiency. The new memory architectures triple bandwidth over the 5400 and bring back DDR3, allowing up to 18 DIMMS per CPU. This allows you to reach higher memory configurations at a lower cost — a significant boon to server virtualization, where memory is typically the first resource to be fully utilized.