New Intel Architecture is Built to Scale—At Many LevelsNew Intel Architecture is Built to Scale—At Many Levels

Lately I've been getting a lot of questions on the recently announced Intel® Xeon® Processor E5 Family and how it will meet today's evolving computing needs. To answer that question, I think it helps to take a step back and look at the big picture.

In the IT world, multiple trends are driving a whole new set of requirements for the data center. For starters, the Internet continues to grow. It has more users, more connected devices, and more types of interactions-whether it's person-to-person, person-to-system, or system-to-system. In a parallel trend, global competition is increasing. Around the world, people can participate in commerce and interact in ways that were not possible in the past. And all the while, the pace of technology innovation is accelerating.

These trends are reframing the challenges for IT professionals. To keep the business competitive, the IT organization must transform itself to support cloud computing solutions, a wide variety of new user devices, and ever-larger amounts of data. This transformation requires an unprecedented level of scale to support not just hundreds or thousands of employees but millions of global customers.

The new Intel Xeon Processor E5 Family is built for this new world where scale is everything. It's designed to help organizations accommodate today's increasing numbers of customers, richer user experiences, and unpredictable demand.

Here are some of the ways the new Intel processors are built to scale:

• Leadership performance. Performance is at the heart of the Intel heritage, and that remains true today. With the new generation of processors, we continue to increase server performance. For example, we have new instructions built into the processor to handle mathematical workloads that are important for things like simulation and analysis.

• Breakthrough I/O innovation. It's not just processor performance that we have improved. We are innovating throughout the system, including the integration of input/output (I/O) technologies onto the processor. Intel® Integrated I/O enables data to move in and out of the processor faster, which is one of the keys to scale. It helps ensure balanced system performance and balanced system scalability.

• Trusted security. The Intel Xeon Processor E5 Family continues the Intel focus on security enhancements. To address today's security challenges, it includes features that accelerate data encryption and enable the use of trusted computing pools-so you can be sure that the systems running your applications are exactly who they say they are.

• Exceptional efficiency. As computing environments grow, power consumption becomes a bottleneck that can limit expansion. We're helping organizations address this challenge with the most energy-efficient processor we have ever shipped. The new Intel Xeon processor E5 family offers better performance at the same power level. In addition, we've put more power management control into the hands of IT administrators with capabilities that enable them to set power policies.

The importance of the Intel Xeon Processor E5 Family is reflected in the response from the industry. It's been truly remarkable. From cloud software providers to global hardware manufacturers, the industry is investing heavily in products and solutions derived from the Intel Xeon Processor E5 Family. That's evident in both the number of systems and the range of solutions that incorporate the new processors.

The Intel technology, of course, is just a starting point. Where it really turns into a solution is when our hardware and software partners take our building blocks and create something that delivers business value.

Boyd Davis is a vice president in the Intel Architecture Group, responsible for product and technology marketing for Intel Corporation technology used in data center applications. In this role he is engaged in segment marketing, business management and customer engineering support for Datacenter & Connected Systems Group products including Intel® Xeon™ processors, Intel ® Itanium™ processors, and supporting components and firmware. Boyd received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering in 1990 from Purdue University in Indiana.

The above insights were provided to information by Intel Corporation as part of a sponsored content program. The information and opinions expressed in this content are those of Intel Corporation and its partners and not information or its parent, UBM TechWeb.