Issue #10

Three Key Players

Written by John Martinez

Today's computer whitebox resellers are building servers, workstations, clusters, storage sytstems and other types of technologies, but desktops ina a variety of forms continue to be an integral part of the channel's business.

Intel Xeon 5500 Series Ecosystem - It’s Alive!

Written by John Martinez

Life just doesn’t seem fair sometimes. When Intel launched its Xeon 5500-series architecture, the new CPUs stole the show. After all, they were the ones leveraging four execution cores with Hyper-Threading, cranking away on eight threads per processor, facilitating hardware-accelerated virtualization technology, and cutting power consumption through more granularity in the management of idle resources. But the Xeon 5500-series CPUs aren’t the only components enabling Intel’s message of faster performance, greater energy efficiency, and higher value.

Intel's Xeon 5500 Series Makes Its Big Debut

Written by John Martinez

It’s been a long time since enterprise customers could claim that a processor micro-architecture was designed especially with their needs in mind. But in the case of Nehalem—now known as the Xeon 5500-series family—that’s exactly what happened.

You see, the Core micro-architecture was derived from Intel’s mobile lineup and adapted upward. Its design was inherently dual-core. And linked, optimized caches helped maximize the performance per watt of power consumed. Core-based chips naturally worked really well in notebooks. But they also proved ideal on the desktop, too. It was a twist of irony, then, that Intel’s server group managed to launch its Xeon 5100-series processors one month before the Core 2 Duos made their debut back in 2006.