Industry analyst, Nathan Brookwood of Insight 64, said the adoption of the new PCI-Express 3.0 bus and 10-gigabit Ethernet at the motherboard level will improve throughput for servers. Intel claims the integrated I/O with PCI Express 3.0 can have up to triple the movement of data into and out of the processor. They claim information can be made available faster than ever to support data-hungry applications. This controller will be offered as both LAN on Motherboard (LOM) as well as converged network adapter (CNA) card.
Diane Bryant, Intel vice president and general manager of the Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, was one of the presenters on Tuesday. She gave an excellent overview of the advantages of the E5-2600 with battery such as dell Inspiron 6000 battery , dell G5266 battery , dell Inspiron E1705 battery , dell Inspiron 9200 battery , dell D5318 battery , dell Inspiron 630m battery , dell Inspiron E1405 battery , dell XPS M140 battery , dell Inspiron XPS M1710 battery , dell Inspiron 640m battery , dell Inspiron 7000 battery , dell Inspiron 7500 battery family, pointing out that corporate IT server purchases have a three to five year upgrade window. Many of Intel’s corporate customers are still using Intel’s older systems. With the significant performance improvements of the E5-2600, many of them should be taking advantage of the improved features.
Bryant listed some of the key requirements to enable IT to scale, such as higher performance, energy efficiency, I/O bandwidth and security. Intel claims they have the best combination of performance, built-in capabilities and cost-effectiveness. Intel’s new Xeon processor E5-2600 product families are designed to address these requirements, and take over the workload for the next-generation data center powering servers, storage and communication systems.
On Tuesday, Fujitsu showed their Xeon E5-2600 dual socket 2U rack version. It is expandable to 16 hard drives, up to 7 PCIe Gen 3 cards, and can have as much as 768GB of RAM - all in a 2U rack housing.
Intel’s new integrated X540 Ethernet Controller chipset and LAN card can be a LAN on Motherboard (LOM) as well as converged network adapter (CNA) card. Insight 64's Nathan Brookwood said bringing 10GbE onto motherboards represents a big step in the right direction for increasing performance levels of lower-cost servers. "It's been talked about for years, but it'll be finally coming to fruition," Brookwood said.
The floor was then opened for questions. Right off the bat, the first question was about AMD’s purchase of SeaMicro. Industry analysts saw the move as a blow to Intel, which had appeared to have formed a tight relationship with SeaMicro as the CPU of choice for their high-density microservers. Bryant said Intel "did look at SeaMicro's fabric technology. There are probably very few people they didn't come to and shop their solution to. We were not impressed. We declined and very soon after our competitor acquired them."
The presenter's dismissive words seemed to say one thing, yet body language seemed to tell another story. Her body language seemed to indicate that some folks at Intel were NOT very happy about AMD jumping out and purchasing SeaMicro and making them their own captive "partner"/division. The proof of the pudding will be whether AMD captures any significant design wins and makes sales strides in the corporate microserver marketplace.
With Intel’s year in, year out proven track record and market share in the x86 server arena, plus the fact that Intel’s last major server CPU design change was over three years ago, they should sustain their dominate position of owning nearly 80 percent of the corporate IT x86 server marketplace. Independent benchmarking has yet to verify all of Intel’s above performance claims. Today’s x86 “Big Iron” server market is shifting as microservers come on-line, transaction per Watt of consumed power becomes more important with less focus on Big Iron’s brute force performance solutions, along with the ARM 64-bit IP and MIPS 64-bit IP. These facts could all erode Intel’s secure position in the server data center world.