Woodcrest leads Intel fightback

Intel has released a range of dual-core Xeon server chips based on its new Core micro-architecture that it hopes will reverse a drift of sales towards rival AMD.

The company claims the Xeon 5100 series, codenamed Woodcrest, offers 135 per cent better performance on 40 per cent less electrical power than its predecessors. Power efficiency is becoming as important in servers as it is on mobiles, to reduce the need for cooling, reduce electricity bills, and allow more processors to be packed into server racks.

The 5100 chips will be offered at clock rates up to 3GHz, with a 1.3GHz front-side bus (FSB) and 4MB of Level 2 (L2) cache shared between the two cores.

They are made on a 65nm process, which helps reduce the power drain; and they support Wide Dynamic Execution, increasing the number of instructions processed per clock cycle. The chips also contain logic allowing one of the cores to use all the shared cache if the other is idle.

A desktop range codenamed Conroe based on the Core micro-architecture is expected to be released in July, and a mobile version codenamed Merom will appear later this year.

AMD’s Opteron server processors have had a technological lead over their Intel rivals, largely because of their on-chip memory controller which avoids bottlenecks, swapping data with memory.

AMD claims its market share of x86 processors rose from 16 per cent in the final three months of 2005 to 22 per cent in the first quarter of 2006. A year ago its total share was just seven per cent.

But the surge already shows signs of slowing down, with a warning of falling profits. And test results on Intel's new Conroe processors show these will be tough compeition for AMD on the desktop.