Home New Xeons bring dramatically lower idle power
News

New Xeons bring dramatically lower idle power

Scott Wasson
Disclosure
Disclosure
In our content, we occasionally include affiliate links. Should you click on these links, we may earn a commission, though this incurs no additional cost to you. Your use of this website signifies your acceptance of our terms and conditions as well as our privacy policy.

Intel’s Xeons have taken quite a bit of market share from AMD’s Opterons in the past year or so, and rightly so, thanks to a nice combination of performance and power efficiency under load. Those Xeons have had a notable Achilles’ heel, though, in the form of high power consumption at idle. (You can see our numbers from when we measured it, for instance.) The Xeons’ high idle power primarily comes from two culprits: the Xeon platform’s use of FB-DIMMs and the CPU chips themselves. This fact has left something of an opening for the Opteron, whose place in the data center has been cemented by its overall power efficiency. However, Intel has just announced some changes to its Xeon lineup today that could change the picture dramatically.

The headline news you may see around the web is the official introduction of two new Xeon models, the X5365 and L5335. The quad-core Xeon X5365 runs at 3.0GHz on a 1333MHz front-side bus, and we reviewed it a while back as part of Intel’s “V8” media creation platform. This CPU has been shipping exclusively in Mac workstations for some time, but should now be more widely available. The L5335 is a new low-power quad-core processor with a 2GHz clock speed, 1333MHz bus, and a thermal design power (TDP) of just 50W—a product distinctly poised to take on AMD’s upcoming Barcelona-based Opteron chips.

The bigger news that you may hear less about is the advent of the new G stepping of chips across the Xeon lineup. These chips are still manufactured using a 65nm fabrication process, but a combination of changes—including the ability to reach lower CPU multipliers and thus lower clock speeds—leads to much lower power consumption at idle for many Xeon models. Here are the numbers Intel presented to us on the reduction in idle power use for its quad-core Xeons:

Clock speed Front-side bus TDP

Old idle power

New idle power

Xeon X5365
3.00GHz 1333 MHz 120W

50W

25W

Xeon X5355
2.66GHz 1333 MHz 120W

50W

25W

Xeon E5340
2.33GHz 1333 MHz 80W

30W

25W

Xeon E5330
2.00GHz 1333 MHz 80W

34W

34W

Xeon E5320
1.86GHz 1066 MHz 80W

30W

30W

Xeon E5310
1.60GHz 1066 MHz 80W

34W

34W

Xeon L5335
2.00GHz 1333 MHz 50W

N/A

24W

Xeon L5320
1.86GHz 1066 MHz 50W

24W

24W

Xeon L5310
1.60GHz 1066 MHz 50W

24W

24W

And for the dual-core Xeons:

Clock speed Front-side bus TDP

Old idle power

New idle power

Xeon 5160
3.00GHz 1333 MHz 65W

N/A

8W

Xeon 5150
2.66GHz 1333 MHz 65W

24W

8W

Xeon 5140
2.33GHz 1333 MHz 65W

24W

8W

Xeon 5130
2.00GHz 1333 MHz 65W

27W

27W

Xeon 5120
1.86GHz 1066 MHz 65W

24W

12W

Xeon 5110
1.60GHz 1066 MHz 65W

15W

6W

Power use at idle drops by as much as 25W per processor—or 50W total in a dual-socket system—for the high-end quad-core Xeons, with smaller reductions for slower CPUs. These improvements may not entirely make up the idle power gap with the Opteron, but they should come fairly close. Given that Intel has the performance lead and double the density of cores per socket, well, let’s just say AMD needs to deliver Barcelona now more than ever.

Nevertheless, the G-step Xeons are just a minor marker in Intel’s roadmap, whose next major milestone involves 45nm “Harpertown” Xeons and a new “Stoakley” platform designed to complement them.

Latest News

Gold Miner Nilam Resources Shares Surge 22x Amidst Bitcoin Buying Announcement
Crypto News

Gold Miner Nilam Resources Shares Surge 22x Amidst Bitcoin Buying Announcement

BlackRock CEO Goes Bullish on BTC as Spot Bitcoin ETF Crosses $17 Billion
Crypto News

BlackRock CEO Goes Bullish on BTC as Spot Bitcoin ETF Crosses $17 Billion

Spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) continue to receive massive inflows as investor demand skyrockets, with BlackRock’s IBIT at the forefront. Notably, IBIT has hit a whopping $17 billion in AUM...

Elliott Wave Pattern Indicates Ripple (XRP) Might Surge to $13
Crypto News

Elliott Wave Pattern Indicates Ripple (XRP) Might Surge to $13

Renowned market analyst Tony Severino, also called “The Bull,”  has unveiled a captivating analysis of XRP’s potential price trajectory. His findings suggest that XRP could be poised for an extraordinary...

XRP ETF Premium May Record 100x to $500 Chad Steingraber
Crypto News

XRP ETF Premium May Record 100x Growth Chad Steingraber

NFL
Streaming News & Events

NFL Discloses Moving Two NFL Games Into Streaming in 2024

Crypto News

Unveiling the Most Popular Crypto Presales in March Among Americans

Apple Users Are Being Spammed with Unwanted Password Reset Requests as Part of ‘MFA Bombing'
News

Apple Users Are Being Spammed with Unwanted Password Reset Requests as Part of ‘MFA Bombing’