Intel said that the new Xeons established 16 new world records in performance, topping the IBM POWER architecture, SPARC - and even its own Itanium, once pitched as the highest-performing architecture in the world. Intel said that its Xeons, of which a new family is released every year, will offer 40 to 50 percent performance improvements on average per year. Itanium, on a two-year cycle, will double its performance every two years, so that the upcoming "Poulson" chip will offer twice the performance of the "Tukwila" architecture, said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center Group.
The new E7 processors will actually make up just a small percentage of Intel's overall server shipments, with most server vendors preferring Intel's mainstream Xeon chips. Skaugen estimated the multiprocessor server market at about a tenth the size of the dual-socket market, but with about 20 percent of the revenue. However, Skaugen also noted that IT managers could replace 18 dual-core servers with a single high-end E7-based server.
The Xeon processor E7-8800/4800/2800 families range in price from $774 to $4,616 in quantities of 1,000, Intel said The Xeon processor E3-1200 family ranges in price from $189 to $612 in quantities of 1,000.
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