Yesterday, Intel announced that their flagship server processor, the Xeon Nehalem-EX, is being succeeded by the Xeon Westmere-EX, a process-shrinking " tick" in Intel's terminology. By shrinking Intel's largest Xeon to 32nm, the best Westmere-EX Xeon is now clocked 6% higher (2.4GHz versus 2.26GHz), gets two extra cores (10 versus 8) and has a 30MB L3 (instead of 24MB).

As is typical for a tick, the core improvements are rather subtle. The only tangible improvement should be the improved memory controller that is capable of extracting up to 20% more bandwidth out of the same DIMMs. The Nehalem-EX was the first quad-socket Xeon that was not starved by memory bandwidth, and we expect that the Westmere-EX will perform very well in bandwidth limited HPC applications.

Read on to learn more about the latest Xeon and the new server we are testing.

We received Dell's latest R810 server for review, coupled with the Intel Xeon X7560. The R810 supports two or four octal-core Intel Xeon Nehalem EX processors, with the potential of running up to 64 threads and half a Terabyte of memory. It also includes enhanced RAS features and hopes to compete with the RISC heavyweights like IBM's Power 7 servers, only at a much lower cost.

With stiff competition from AMD's Magny-Cours servers, IT professionals need to focus more than ever on the intended use before diving into a new server. We'll show where the Xeon EX does well and where other solutions have an advantage as we look at the R810 and Nehalem EX.