The server will run on Intel's Xeon E3-1200 V2 series of processors which are said to be faster and more power-efficient than the previous E3 chips that were based on Intel's Sandy Bridge processors. A spokesman for Intel said that the new chips provide more performance-per-watt, and a server with E3-1200 V2 processors drawing 17 watts of power in a 3U rack space could provide as much as 53% more performance than a 20-watt Sandy Bridge Xeon CPU.
According to Dell, the Xeon E3-1200 V2 chips draw between 17 to 45 watts of power and are made using the 22-nanometer process. In addition to that, these chips include 3D transistors, which are faster and more power-efficient than the 2D transistors that are found in the existing 32-nanometer process chips. Unfortunately, Intel was unable to disclose any other information on the new Xeon processors though the company did announce in April that it was planning on releasing its first Xeon server chips based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture towards the end of this quarter. These would be targeted at microservers, which are low-power servers with shared components designed primarily for web serving and cloud applications.
The PowerEdge C5520 is able to scale performance while simultaneously reducing the number of servers in a datacenter according to Dell. The company also noted that this new microserver has already helped one company consolidate four servers into one while running a software infrastructure based on the Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) software stack. Dell says that the microserver will be available on May 22 for a starting price of $12,210.
Source: PC World - Dell Announces First Server With Intel's Ivy Bridge Xeon Chips
