Intel Unveils 10-Core Xeon Processors

MojoKid writes "Intel announced its new E-series of Xeon processors today, claiming that they will deliver nearly unparalleled advances in CPU performance and power efficiency. It has been just over a year since Santa Clara released its Nehalem-based octal-core Beckton processors. Whereas Beckton was focused entirely on performance and architectural efficiency, these new Xeons are more balanced. The new chips boost the core count to ten (up to 20 threads with HT enabled) and will be offered at a wide range of power envelopes. The new E7 series incorporates the benefits of the Sandy Bridge architecture, its support for new security processing instructions, and its improved power management technology. Intel has also baked in support for low-voltage DIMMs, which allows vendors to opt for 1.35v products."

SB is no joke performance wise too

[Sycraft-fu]

I've got a SB desktop computer and it just screams. they made some sizable per-clock performance improvements. Also AES-NI is no joke. I am pretty amazed by the speed. Tryecrypt supports it and the benchmark difference is huge. With a 100MB buffer a pure software AES implementation benches at 649MB/sec on my system (553MB/sec for Twofish, 254MB/sec for Serpent). Same test with AES-NI on, 2.7GB/sec. That is 4.2x the speed.

Could be really useful for web servers, particularly if you are looking at going all SSL all the time.

Re:unparalleled

[ArcherB]

claiming that they will deliver nearly unparalleled advances in CPU performance

What's the point of having 10 cores then ?

I laughed at NEARLY. Nearly unparalleled is not unparalleled. Not unparalleled is... well, paralleled.