Intel's Xeon chips make e-tail debut

Latest high end processors from Intel find their way into the wild.

Intel's shiny new Xeon server chips have popped up on e-tailers this week, giving us a sneak peak at what we can expect when the company launches them officially sometime soon.

Amongst other goodies on offer, online hardware retailers were advertising quad-core chips from the Xeon 5500 series - belonging to Chipzilla's Nehalem EP series of server chips for dual-socket servers and workstations - with speeds ranging between 2.0GHz and 3.2GHz.

Like all chips built on Intel's Nehalem architecture, the Xeon fritters all have QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) technology to purportedly speed up server performance. Intel has boasted that because its QPI tech has a memory controller bunged in, it allows the CPU to communicate with system components, like graphics cards, more quickly.

Intel has also claimed the upcoming chips will reduce some of the bottlenecks experienced in previous chip microarchitectures, whilst the four cores will be capable of executing two software threads concurrently, running eight threads at the same time.

Quad-core Xeon X5500-series processors running between 2.66GHz and 2.93GHz, with 8MB of shared L3 cache seem to be priced between $US1,000 and $US1,650 whilst the Xeon W5580, which runs at 3.2GHz, is being offered by Keenzo Electronics for $US1,785 and for $US1,679 by Tech Micro.

Xeon E5500 series chips running between 2.0GHz and 2.53GHz, like the Xeon E5504 and E5506 with 4MB of shared L3 cache, are on offer from between $US250 to $US320 at e-tailers, whilst the Xeon E5520, E5530 and E5540 chips, with 8MB of L3 cache, are going for anywhere between $US400 to $US800.

A ThinkStation D10 workstation, based on the Xeon E5540 processor, was also spotted on Provantage for a whopping $US4,184.

Intel's last big release was its Core i7 chips for high-end desktops back in November, which Chipzilla says it will scale down for more mainstream use and notebooks later in 2009. In the meanwhile, when the Xeon chips are released, they'll go head to head with AMD's quad-core Opteron 'Shanghai' chips, launched last year.

AMD has just refreshed its Shanghai lineup, which now has chips running at speeds of between 2.1GHz to 2.8GHz.