Intel Corp. has added 10 server components to its product lineup that support its new Xeon chips with faster front-side buses and larger cache, it announced Monday.
The server boards and chassis are designed for the Xeon DP chip, used in one-way and two-way servers, said Philip Brace, director of marketing for Intel’s enterprise platforms and services division. Intel upgraded speed of the front-side bus, or the main data pathway in a chip, in the Xeon DP chip to 533MHz in November.
Five new server boards for the Xeon DP chip were released Monday. The Intel Server Board SE7501WV2 is a rack-optimized board designed for Intel’s 1U (1.75 inches) and 2U server chassis, Brace said. The other three boards, the SE7501HG2, the SE7501BR2, and the SE7501CW2, are designed for pedestal workgroup or departmental servers. The HG2 is designed for performance, while the CW2 is the value option, Brace said.
Intel also released a server board that can be used in either servers or workstations. The Intel Server Board SE7505VB2 is designed for use with the new Xeon DP chips and Intel’s 7505 chipset. It comes with an AGP (accelerated graphics port) 8x for advanced graphics technology.
Builders will also have two new choices among Intel’s family of chassis products. The company introduced the SC5250-E, a chassis designed for the small- and medium-size business market, Brace said. Additionally. the existing SC5200 chassis was upgraded with the ability to hotswap a serial ATA backplane as part of Monday’s announcement.
Intel sells server boards and chassis separately to system builders of one-way and two-way servers, but servers with four or more processors require the board and chassis to be integrated in a server platform, Brace said. The Xeon MP chip was recently upgraded with a larger L2 cache, and Intel has updated two server platforms, the SRSH4 and the SPSH4, to support the larger cache, he said.
The SRSH4 is designed for four-way rack servers, while the SPSH4 works in four-way pedestal servers, Brace said.
Finally, Intel made three new RAID (redundant array of independent disks) controllers available for server manufacturers. The PCI (peripheral component interconnect) controllers come in performance, midrange, and value configurations, and feature Intel’s RAID software.
Pricing information was not immediately available. Intel, based in Santa Clara, Calif., will sell these products to distributors, who then sell them to system builders, an Intel spokesperson said.
