by John West, for HPCWire
Intel’s Xeon 5500 series processor, the follow-on to Harpertown and the chip formerly known as the Nehalem-EP was launched this week, was launched this week and computer vendors the world over collectively exhaled their announcements onto the IT press.
This week’s release of the Xeon 5500 is Intel’s unveiling of the server version of the Nehalem microarchitecture, the successor to Intel’s Core microarchitecture. In Intel’s tick-tock release schedule, this is the tock: Nehalem uses the same 45nm process as Penryn, but introduces a new microarchitecture. The next tick, codenamed Westmere, will shrink the process to 32nm.
Intel and many of the OEMs that build on Intel’s platforms are saying that the 5500 is Intel’s most significant chip advance in more than a decade. There is a lot to like about this chip for high-end computing. The three integrated memory controllers give the Xeon 5500s more than triple the memory bandwidth of the 5400s, and the chips can access 18 DIMM slots, which, when fully loaded with 8 GB DIMMs, puts 144 GB of DDR3 RAM in a system.
