The New Intel Xeon Processor E5 Family Means More of a Good Thing For Pogo Iris Servers

Posted on March 3, 2012 by psadmin

“No, no, light speed is too slow…straight to ludicrous speed!”

Pogo Linux - storage officeToday Intel announced the launch of their new processor family, the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2600. We’ve been looking forward to this for a long time and have integrated the new processors — including all their new bells and whistles — into our Iris servers!

If you’ve been sitting on the fence, waiting for the latest and greatest to come along, this is the reason to dive in. There are a lot of changes with the new processor family but if you only remember one thing, it should be this: up to 80% better performance than the previous generation. Eighty percent! ‘Nuff said.

Every new generation of processors is bound to have better performance than the last (we wouldn’t want to disappoint Dr. Moore, would we?!) However, in addition to the increased performance, there are two key features we’re excited to integrate into our Iris line of Intel servers.

First off, almost all the I/O that was previously sitting on the south bridge has been moved into the chip. Not only does this increase capacity and bandwidth, it also reduces latency by 30%. That’s a big deal for all the PCI Express connectivity on these servers. More high-speed PCI-e slots is always a good thing. The push to take more functionality off of the motherboard and put it on the chip itself is exciting, and this is a very obvious advantage.

The other great feature for our Iris servers is increased memory capacity. With so many servers being used for virtualization and cloud computing, memory requirements are going through the datacenter roof. This new platform comes to the rescue, with support for 24 DIMM slots and 32GB memory modules.

True, it will be some time before 768GB of memory on a single server will cost less than a new VW Beetle, but having 24 slots does open up many economical possibilities for 192GB and 384GB deployments. Because at the end of the day, it’s not the size of the available memory footprint, it’s how you use it that matters.

Obviously we’re excited about this launch and think you should be as well. Check out our Iris line, or give us a call or email and we can walk through the details of why new is better.

~ The Pogo Team