Intel’s Nehalem architecture was good and all when it was first announced and became a powerful addition to the Xeon family. One of the weaknesses was the power consumption that was higher than expected. Performance was swell though, but a new and more energy efficient Xeon series is on Xeon series is on the way, code-named Jasper Forest. It’s made with 45nm technology and sports features similar to those of the desktop core Lynnfield, e.g. integrated PCI Express controller and DMA bus.
By introducing the I/O functionality into the processor Intel has managed to reduce power consumption and make Jasper Forest more efficient than the precursor. At the same time the power consumption and complexity of the platform and chipset design is seriously reduced.
The dual-processing solution integrates two Jasper Forest processors with 16 PCIe Generation 2.0 lanes each and is paired with the Intel® 3420 chipset platform controller hub. This integration of the I/O hub via PCIe enables significant power and space savings, resulting in one of the highest performance-per-watt Intel Xeon chips ever.
A quad-core model will consume 27W less power than the equivalent Bloomfield Xeon models. Intel’s new Jasper Forest series will be TDP rated between 23W and 85W and we can expect models with one, two and four cores. The focus is on the embedded market but also storage which could use the integrated RAID support.
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