Turning Blades Into Pocketknives

Intel Corp. has found a way to squeeze more performance into smaller server rooms with the first dual-core Xeon processor that's also a low-voltage processor, yielding two to four times the performance per watt of previous Xeon platforms.

The dual-core Intel Xeon processor LV has an operational TDP (total dissipated power) ceiling of 31 watts, making it suitable for environments with any combination of space, power, and cooling constraints and boosting the performance of multithreaded, multitasking applications in single-height (1U) rackmount and blade servers. While the CPU's already been adopted by IBM for a new BladeCenter HS20 ultra-low-power blade, Intel will ship its own two-way, four-core single-board-computer reference design for network infrastructure equipment in the second quarter of this year.