With the release of dual-core Xeon chips for blade servers, Intel has again accentuated the ability of companies to save money in terms of lower power consumption and increased reliability.
Studies indicate a blade server can reduce power and cooling costs 15 to 25 percent, meeting the needs of energy-conscious customers. The dual-core/dual-processor capabilities are ideal for a wide range of low-power communications and embedded applications.
Blade-server fact: Even blades that don't use lower-power processors can reduce the overall power and cooling requirements of a rack by eliminating many duplicate power-consuming infrastructure components that are included in 1U and 2U rack servers.
A blade server might only consume one-half or two-thirds the power of traditional 1U and 2U rack-mount servers of equivalent processing power. The reason is that the consolidation of the resources helps the blade server gain an economy of scale. For example, rather than having 10 500-watt supplies for 10 traditional 1U servers, a blade server can have two 2,000-watt supplies.
With all that support gear removed and put into the shared chassis, the blade server is much smaller. With the reduced size, the blade server can be hot-plugged into the chassis, which provides the power and cooling. Therefore, the shared chassis provides a much more efficient use of space and power.
Add new, low power processors to the efficiency of a single chassis and blade servers become an increasingly attractive option for server consolidation projects.
The three new Xeon server chips released this year by Intel are Sossaman (released March 14), Dempsey (May 23) and Woodcrest (June 26).
The Xeon chips combine the benefits of two distinct high-performance execution cores with intelligent power management features to deliver significantly greater performance-per-watt over previous single-core Intel Xeon processor-based platforms. The following is a brief explanation of each:
Sossaman (also known as the Xeon Low Voltage) uses approximately 30 watts of power and is rated at 31 watts Thermal Design Power (TDP). It packs two to four times greater performance-per-watt than its predecessor, a 55-watt version of a single-core Intel Xeon chip called "Irwindale."
The processor comes in 1.66GHz and 2.0GHz speeds and offers 32-bit instead of 64-bit addressing (because it is derived from a notebook chip). It has a front-side bus speed of 667 MHz and L2 cache size of 2 MiB.
Within almost a month of each other, Dempsey (Dual-Core Xeon 5000 series) and Woodcrest (Dual-Core Xeon 5100) were released by Intel. The release of Woodcrest made some believe Dempsey, based on the Intel "Bensley" server platform, was immediately obsolete. However, Intel has marketed Dempsey as a low-cost alternative to Woodcrest.
The most important comparison of Woodcrest with Dempsey is that Woodcrest consumes far less power and dissipates much less heat than Dempsey because the micro-architecture was heavily optimized to reduce power consumption. Woodcrest comes in three varieties, the 40W TDP versions optimized for blades, the mainstream 65W TDP parts, and the 3GHz top bin part which has an 80W TDP.
All parts below 3GHz will fall into the 65W or 40W TDP range. In comparison, the top bin Dempsey parts had a 130W TDP, and mid range parts were rated at 95W, and the massive power requirements and thermal issues precluded ever using Dempsey in a blade.
Moreover, Woodcrest also has improved sleep states and clock gating which help to lower average power.
Dempsey's speed ranges between 2.67 and 3.73 GHz. Some models have an FSB speed of 667 MHz while others have an FSB of 1066 MHz.
Woodcrest, the first Intel core micro-architecture to be launched, provides an 80 percent boost in performance, while reducing power consumption 20 percent relative to Pentium D.
It has an FSB of 1333 MHz in most models, except for the 5110 and 5120, which have an FSB of 1066 MHz, with the fastest processor clocking in at 3.0 GHz. All Woodcrests use LGA 771 and all but the 5160 and 5148LV have a TDP of 65 W, which is much less than the previous generation of 130 W. The 5160 has a TDP of 80 W, still much less than 130 W.
Intel has begun shipping to its customers the next generation of Intel Server Systems, Server Boards and Server Chassis featuring the Dual-Core Xeon 5000 and 5100 sequences (Dempsey and Woodcrest).
The use of these blade servers provides great benefits to small and large businesses alike. For smaller operations, one or several individual servers are often the most cost-effective way to support a small network. In larger installations, particularly ones that are expected to grow quickly in capacity, the blade server architecture offers more impact and easy expandability.
In summary, blade servers - with the latest releases of Intel dual-core Xeon chips - increase reliability, decrease energy consumption, and are the best logical choice for a company to save money and improve manageability.