The Intel India team, in Bangalore, has designed Intel's first six-core x86 microprocessor, the Intel Xeon 7400 series processor (previously codenamed "Dunnington"), which has 16MB of L3 cache memory and 1.9 billion transistors.
The Intel India team planned and executed
end-to-end design activities including front-end design, pre-silicon
logic validation and back-end design for the Dunnington microprocessor,
completing the transition of Intel's entire Xeon family to the
company's 45nm Hi-k manufacturing process.
"This is the first time that a microprocessor was created in a design lab in India. Intel had not worked on 45nm technology outside the US until now. This is also the first time a chip has been launched after a first design iteration at Intel," said Dr Praveen Vishakantaiah, president of Intel India.
The Xeon 7400 series processor is said to deliver 50% better performance than its quad-core predecessor while using 10% less power. The post-silicon validation activities - which determine whether a product is ready for volume production - like system validation, also met Intel's highest standards of specification in terms of quality, including reliability, application compatibility, functionality, manufacturability, physical parameters, performance and platform design compliance.
"All these activities were undertaken at Intel's Bangalore facility and we took every measure to ensure that we met the performance benchmark targets and longevity goals to protect the end customers' investment in Intel's high-end server technology," said R Ravichandran, director - Sales, Intel South Asia.
With up to six processing cores per chip and 16MB of shared cache memory, applications built for virtualized environments and data demanding workloads - such as databases, business intelligence, enterprise resource planning and server consolidation - show a dramatic performance increase of almost 50% in some cases. Platforms based on these processors can scale up to 16 processor "sockets" to deliver servers with up to 96 processing cores inside, offering tremendous scalability, ample computing threads, extensive memory resources and uncompromising reliability for enterprise data centers.
According to Ravichandran, the arrival of these processors extends Intel's lead in the high-end server segment. "This new processor series helps IT manage increasingly complex enterprise server environments, providing a great opportunity to boost the scalable performance of multi-threaded applications within a stable platform infrastructure.
With new features such as additional cores, large shared caches and advanced virtualization technologies, the Xeon 7400 series delivers record-breaking performance that will lead enterprises into the next wave of virtualization deployments."
From September, servers based on the Intel Xeon 7400 processor series are expected to be announced by about 50 manufacturers around the world, including four-socket rack servers from Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens, Hitachi, HP, IBM, NEC, Sun, Supermicro and Unisys; four-socket blade servers from Egenera, HP, Sun and NEC; and servers that scale up to 16-sockets from IBM, NEC and Unisys. Local Indian OEMs such as HCL and Wipro will also offer this new generation series of servers.
Many software vendors are also supporting Intel Xeon 7400-based platforms, including Citrix, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP and VMware.
by Sufia Tippu, Bangalore
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