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."

Re:Unfortunately AMD's performance is lagging

[TheRaven64]

Bulldozer cores do even less - they're not quite SMT, but they're not quite full cores either (for example, pairs of them share an FPU). So, the number of Bulldozer cores is not quite equivalent to the number of i7 cores, and not quite equivalent to the number of i7 contexts (double the number of cores), but somewhere in the middle. I'm also not sure if they yet have any equivalent of Intel's Turbo Boost, which lets you overclock one core while powering down or underclocking the others, so single-threaded workloads (or a single CPU-bound thread in a multithreaded workload) get a boost.