Intel Corporation has extended its lead in the high-end server segment, setting new standards in virtualization performance with the launch of seven 45 nanometer (nm)-manufactured Intel Xeon Processor 7400 Series products. With up to six processing cores per chip and 16MB of shared cache memory, applications built for virtualized environments and data demanding workloads, such as databases, business intelligence, enterprise resource planning and server consolidation, experience dramatic performance increases of almost 50 percent in some cases.

On September 15th Intel plans to fabricate the Intel Xeon 7400 Dunnington series processor, the company's last Penryn generation processor to be released. Xeon 7400 will mark the end of a previous server era, and after it the new Nehalem Core i7 processor family will start to appear in the fourth quarter. The Xeon 7400 will be Intel's first 6-core server chip. It will be produced using 45nm high-k process technology and will boast 16MB of L3 cache. The Xeon 7400 Dunnington series is also one of the first Intel chips to have a monolithic design, like Nehalem. In other words, all six cores will be on one piece of silicon. To date, for any processor having more than two cores, Intel has put two separate pieces of silicon - referred to as die - inside of one chip package. Server vendors announcing Xeon 7400 powered products will include Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, IBM and Unisys, according to Intel senior vice president Pat Gelsinger.

Intel Atom, the 'small wonder' of the computing industry, may have been making a mark with ULPC notebooks and inexpensive ITX solutions, but the UK-based web-hosting company Bytemark found a new application of this chip, dedicated servers. The Atom processors have sufficient computing power to handle web server processes. In Bytemark's words, they're "pushing the boundaries of what Intel Atom was intended to do". Although for now the design is simplistic, ITX based, Bytemark plans to take this concept to a large-scale, making inexpensive, energy-efficient servers. A dedicated server with a 1.60 GHz Atom, 2 GB memory, 2x 100 GB HDDs in RAID 1 (that's 100 GB of available storage), for £495 (US $992) per annum.

MSI Announces Motherboards and Server Barebones Supporting AMD Quad-Core Opteron

Along with the new generation AMD Opteron processors (code-named Barcelona), MSI has launched its new server products - K9NU Speedster server board and K1-106 rack server.

Based around the nForce 3400 chipset, K9NU-Speedster Series motherboards and K1-106 Series server barebones support single AMD Opteron 2200 series quad-core processors. K9NU-Speedster Series also provide memory bandwidth up to 8.5GB/s (DDR2-533) or 10.5GB/s (DDR2-667). XGI Volari Z7 graphic processor with 16MB video memory can meet users' needs without adding a graphics adapter. However, both motherboards have two PCI-E x16 slot supporting NVIDIA SLI technology for future expansion.