Intel reveals new top-of-the-range Xeon 7500

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By Darien Graham-Smith

Posted on 31 Mar 2010 at 17:41

Intel has formally launched its new series of top-end workstation and server CPUs, the Xeon 7500 range.

Based on the Nehalem EX architecture (codenamed Beckton), the range brings clock speeds up to 2.66GHz, parts with eight physical cores, Hyper-Threading and a massive 24MB of L3 cache.

“The 7500 series represents the biggest performance leap we’ve seen in our Xeon space,” announced Xeon platform director Shannon Poulin at the launch in London. Intel claims that a single processor will provide, on average, three times the performance of a previous-generation Xeon 7400 part, giving considerable scope for server consolidation through virtualisation.

The 7500 series represents the biggest performance leap we’ve seen in our Xeon space

The architecture also brings greatly expanded scalability. Eight-way processor configurations can now be implemented on the motherboard via QPI, and up to 256 CPUs can work together under suitable node controller hardware.

RAM support is also extended. Up to 16 DIMM slots, hosting up to 256GB of RAM, can now be connected to each physical processor, giving a four-way server an addressable capacity of 1TB.

Another innovation of the 7500 series is Intel’s new Machine Check Architecture Recovery system, which kicks in when an unrecoverable memory error is detected. Rather than forcing a shutdown of the entire server, the hardware can now selectively alert only the virtualised OS, enabling that virtual machine to reboot without affecting other VMs running on the same hardware.

The parts use the older 45nm process rather than the 32nm process found on Intel’s newest desktop chips, and indeed Poulin confirmed that parts have been shipping to server manufacturers for three months to ensure maximum availability of hardware at launch. He confirmed that details of a 32nm Westmere EX architecture would officially surface this summer.