Super Micro Computer, Inc., a global leader in high-performance, high-efficiency server technology and green computing unveils its new generation server platforms supporting the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600/1600 families at CeBIT 2012 in Hannover, Germany this week. This comprehensive product launch showcases the vast array of systems, serverboards and computing solutions Supermicro has deployed delivering higher performance with Intel's newest 8 core, 16 thread processors.

Debuting alongside this launch are innovative, free-air cooled systems designed to withstand 47 C operating temperature environments that make it easier to achieve a better PUE (e.g., 1.05). In addition, Supermicro has created a new platform architecture dubbed "FatTwin", an evolution of Supermicro's Twin architecture, offering enhanced system cooling, power savings, lower TCO and ultimate flexibility to support any application or upgrade path. Major advances in high-efficiency (95%) Digital Switching power supplies and integrated UPS battery backup module technologies provide increased efficiency and high-availability for mission critical applications. When combined with full rack integration services and new Data Center Management software that manages health, power and maintenance of servers in large deployments, Supermicro provides the most complete, scalable computing solutions with maximized performance and the highest levels of efficiency.

Dell today announced a portfolio of blade, rack and tower PowerEdge servers optimized for use in demanding enterprise environments. As the only one of the top five server vendors to grow server revenues in Q4 2011 with 9.7 percent year-over-year revenue growth, Dell continues to innovate to deliver features that are industry firsts and make the PowerEdge 12th generation servers the company's highest performing, most manageable servers ever. With this new server series, customers ranging from small businesses to hyper-scale data centers can help maximize efficiency by streamlining and automating operations, help achieve better business application performance and business continuity.

"Dell designed the new PowerEdge servers with input gathered from more than 7,700 customer interactions in 17 countries across four continents," said Brad Anderson, President of Enterprise Solutions Group at Dell. "Our customers told us that they need end-to-end solutions to handle the complex workload problems they face every day. As such, we built our new generation of servers, systems management and workload solutions to address the needs of business end users who require maximum performance to run mission-critical applications and IT departments which demand more efficient, secure and reliable operations."

SGI, the trusted leader in technical computing, today announced that it is continuing its march toward exascale computing with the integration of the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family into all of its high performance compute (HPC) server and storage platforms and product families. Full support for the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family in the SGI Rackable, SGI ICE X HPC and SGI Modular InfiniteStorage (MIS) platforms is also now available.

SGI has been shipping Rackable servers to its public cloud customers since September 2011, and is shipping 26.73 teraflops per rack this month in its ICE X platform. The MIS server platform represents the densest storage server platform in the industry today, and is based solely on the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family. As the most flexible, high-performance computing platform in the industry, the SGI Rackable line takes advantage of the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 family to drive the most dramatic performance improvements in a typical product generation - in some cases up to 2X¹ and beyond the performance of the previous generation for high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.

Hitachi Data Systems Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., today announced that it will expand its family of blade and rack server products for the enterprise market. The forthcoming Hitachi Compute Systems will be based on the new Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family introduced today by Intel Corporation.

"By leveraging the new Intel Xeon processor E5 family, upcoming Hitachi Compute Systems will feature faster performance, higher density and greater energy efficiency," said Roberto Basilio, vice president, Infrastructure Platforms Product Management, Hitachi Data Systems. "Hitachi Compute Systems offer innovative designs with unique advantages in scalability, flexible I/O configuration and high availability. They are ideal servers upon which to build converged data center solutions. Seamless management integration with Hitachi Data Systems storage and data networking components give customers an easy operational interface. This saves costs, reduces errors and allows faster, more effective deployment and management of virtual IT environments - all of which create greater efficiencies across the data center."

Addressing the incredible growth of data traffic in the cloud, Intel Corporation announced the record-breaking Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family. These new processors deliver leadership performance, best data center performance per watt1,4, breakthrough I/O innovation and trusted hardware security features to enable IT to scale. These processors are not only at the heart of servers and workstations, but will also power the next generation of storage and communication systems from leading vendors around the world.

Forecasts call for 15 billion connected devices and over 3 billion connected users by 2015. The amount of global data center IP traffic is forecasted to grow by 33 percent annually through 2015, surpassing 4.8 zetabytes per year, more than 3 times the amount in 2011. At these levels, each connected user will generate more than 4 GB of data traffic every day - the equivalent of a 4-hour HD movie. This will increase the amount of data that needs to be stored by almost 50 percent per year. In order to scale to meet this growth, the worldwide number of cloud servers is expected to more than triple by 2015.

TYAN, an industry-leading server platform manufacturer and subsidiary of MiTAC International Corp., announces 8 cutting-edge platforms based on the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family. These platforms are designed to deliver the benefits of Intel's latest processor architecture. They offer high peak performance along with outstanding power efficiency and are designed for today's HPC/GPU and general server applications. These products help channel customers build solutions for applications ranging from the largest data centers all the way down to the smallest server room implementations in a quick and efficient way.

TYAN's full array of 8 Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family-based platforms help users build systems that both increase IT capacity and reduce the total IT cost of ownership. TYAN's Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 product family-based platform portfolio includes 5 motherboards and 3 barebones systems that meet demands ranging from general small business computing to mission-critical applications such as virtualization or GPGPU. TYAN motherboards such as the S7050, S7055, or S7056, and barebones servers such as the GN70-B7056, FT48-B7055 and FT77-B7059, help customers address mission critical and massive workload requirements found in GPGPU and HPC applications. For memory intensive applications such as virtualization, TYAN presents the S7052 motherboard with a total of 24 DIMM slots. The S7053 is an excellent choice for applications requiring multiple expansion slots such as embedded and automation.

In line with a solid strategy for commercial products, Acer has advanced its server line with a whole new line up of refreshed server products. This time around, Acer has not only updated the specifications to support the latest Intel Xeon processors E5 family, but has expanded its business portfolio and management tools to provide greater flexibility in modern datacenters.

Greater performance and expandability

The new product designs feature Intel's latest line up of Intel Xeon processor E5 family of CPUs, which give up to two times the performance for certain benchmarks, and up to 8 cores per CPU. The F2 generation, also provides greater expandability and more robust specifications built into every platform. Hardware-aside, the F2 generation will improve on operating system support to include mainstream and open source platforms, and its management tools are enhanced to improve IT ease of use.

Eurotech announces the CPU-111-10, a rugged, high-performance 6U VPX (VITA 46) Single Board Computer (SBC) featuring a quad-core Intel L5408 Xeon processor and integrated 10 Gigabit Ethernet switch to support full-mesh backplane data layer interconnectivity for up to eight SBCs integrated into a single chassis.

Available in air cooled or conduction cooled formats, the CPU-111-10 conforms to the OpenVPX (VITA 65) payload module profile MOD6-PAY-4F2T-12.2.2.4 with four fat pipes (10 GBase-BX4) and two thin pipes (1000Base-T).

SGI, the trusted leader in technical computing, announced today that with over 60 miles of InfiniBand cabling in place at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division at NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif., a scientist was able to utilize 25,000 SGI ICE Intel Xeon processor cores on Pleiades to run a space weather simulation.

One particular area of study is magnetic reconnection, a physical process in highly conducting plasmas such as those that occur in the Earth's magnetosphere, in which the magnetic topology is rearranged and magnetic energy converted to kinetic or thermal energy. This field of research is critical, as these disturbances can disable wide scale power grids, affect satellite transmissions and disrupt airline communications.

ASUS' dual-LGA2011 workstation motherboard, the Z9PE-D8-WS, has been listed by Canadian retailer NCIX for pre-order. It is priced at CA $632.98 (US $634.56). The store page does not go on to mention availability, except that orders will be shipped whenever there are inventories. Given its pre-order listing, we expect the product-launch of the Z9PE-D8-WS not to be too far, considering Intel's launch of a large number of "Sandy Bridge-EP" Xeon processors is just around the corner (within Q1, 2012). The Z9PE-D8-WS is designed to support 2P configurations based on Xeon "Sandy Bridge-EP" processors. The motherboard is further detailed here. To PC enthusiasts, it presents a potential alternative to EVGA's SR-X.Image Courtesy: VR-Zone

Eurocom, (www.eurocom.com) a developer of long lifespan, fully upgradable Notebooks, high performance Mobile Workstations and Mobile Servers, is offering a complete line of NVIDIA Quadro GPU powered Mobile Workstations from 15.6" to 18.4" that are specifically designed for Engineers and Designers.

Eurocom offers a complete line of NVIDIA Quadro mobile GPU's from 3000M, 4000M and 5010M within notebooks ranging from a very small and portable 15.6" EUROCOM Racer to 17.3" Eurocom Neptune and Panther to the 18.4" EUROCOM Leopard 2.0. This enables Eurocom customers to choose the perfect Quadro based system for their professional needs, with up to 4 GB GDDR5 video memory, and 384 CUDA cores.

HP today unveiled the world's first all-in-one workstation with a 27-inch diagonal display. Designed like no other, the display of the new HP Z1 Workstation snaps open so users can easily swap out parts and make upgrades without any tools required.

The HP Z1 combines a sleek industrial design with accelerated performance featuring Intel Xeon processors, NVIDIA Quadro graphics, support for more than 1 billion colors and HP's world-class reliability.

Built for computer-aided design, digital media and entertainment professionals, the HP Z1 provides blazingly fast rendering and performance. It offers a full range of workstation-class graphics cards and processors, and is thoroughly tested and certified to work with today's leading industry applications.

Amulet Hotkey takes the proven data center grade server platform of the Dell PowerEdge M-Series Blade Servers and reconfigures it as a high-performance graphics workstation, building in custom components to provide superior, high-end desktop graphics and PC-over-IP (PCoIP) hardware. The M610X blade, is the first PCoIP workstation blade focused on providing the computing and graphics performance required by state of the art 3D design and CAD/CAM software. This PCoIP multi-monitor blade architecture was pioneered by Amulet Hotkey in 2009 when it brought the first DXM600 quad-head workstation blade to market. As one of the longest standing UK-based Dell OEM Solutions Partners, it is the only PCoIP solutions provider to offer a true tier-one blade platform. The DXM610X joins a growing range of PCoIP and VMware blade solutions that include the DXM610, DXM710 and M910.

While its processor-integrated graphics solutions may not be a match for those from NVIDIA and AMD in terms of client applications such as gaming, Intel thinks it has a shot at the entry-level workstation graphics segment, dominated by the likes of NVIDIA Quadro FX 580 and AMD FirePro V3800 series. Workstation GPUs differ from consumer ones as they are accompanied by more API features, are certified by professional 3D modelling software, and are designed to minimize rendering errors since these renders go on to take shape as millions of dollars worth skyscrapers, for example.

Intel thinks that after the performance success of SNA, it has achieved an acceptable level of performance with its integrated graphics design to take it professional. It is doing so by creating workstation-variants of the "Sandy Bridge" and future "Ivy Bridge" silicons in the Xeon E3-1200 series, and giving their integrated graphics increased functionality. The result is a variant of Intel's HD graphics 3000 series, called Intel HD Graphics P3000 series (P denoting professional). Intel is applying for certification by 3D modeling software developers (it's important, because engineers look for these certifications before picking their hardware). The status of its certification with various vendors is detailed in the first slide below.

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that its AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor family, based on the new "Bulldozer" architecture, was chosen as the winner of The Linley Group's first annual Analysts' Choice Awards. The awards recognize the top processor products of 2011 in several major categories including embedded, mobile, PC, server, design IP and related technology. To choose each winner, the Linley Group's team of technology analysts focused on merits of the leading products that began shipping between January 1, 2011 and December 31, 2011.

"Our analysts are deeply familiar with processor products and technology, having conducted extensive research in order to deliver the firm's popular publications and reports," said Linley Gwennap, founder and principal analyst at The Linley Group. "We chose the winners on the basis of their performance, power, features and cost as appropriate for their target applications."

TYAN offers numerous products for the cloud computing marketplace, including high-density computing, high-density storage, and virtualization environments. TYAN's diverse portfolio provides customers robust options for reducing capital construction and operation costs while offering higher scalability with enhanced performance and energy efficiency.

With key enterprise architectures such as Sandy Bridge-EP awaiting launch, Intel has as many as 40 Xeon processor models to release in the first half of 2012, which it will likely launch in two rounds of 20 models, for each of the first two quarters of this year. In Q1, Intel will release six-core Xeon E5-1660 and E5-1650, and a yet to be named quad-core model; the three will be priced at US US$1,080, US$583 and US$294, respectively. In the same quarter, Intel will also launch 7 eight-core Xeon processor models, including the Xeon E5-2690four six-core processors including E5-2640, three quad-core processors including E5-2609 and dual-core processor E5-2637. Intel will also launch some low-power (energy-efficient) Xeon models, including Xeon E5-2450L and six-core E5-2430L priced at US$1,106 and US$662.

In the second quarter of 2012, Intel will launch the other 20 models. These include Xeon processors based on the Ivy Bridge silicon, and in the socket H2 (LGA1155) package. The Xeon E3-1290v2 is an example of such a chip. These high-grade Ivy Bridge chips will be priced in the range of US$189-884. Then on, 7 more E5 series models will be launched, including Xeon E5-2470, priced between US$192-1,440. Towards the end of the quarter, Intel will launch low-power eight-core and six-core Xeon processor models, including Xeon E5-2650L and E5-2630L, priced at priced at US$1,106 and US$662, respectively.

Intel is working on a new four-socket LGA2011 Server Board product, S4600LH (codename "Lizard Head Pass"), which is capable of holding a total of 1 terabyte of RAM. It is designed mainly for high-performance computing and math-intensive server applications, such as video streaming sites using it for transcoding, etc. The board is able to achieve such large memory expansion room, by providing three DIMM slots per memory channel. Each socket gives four memory channels.

The board supports 8-core Xeon E5-4600 series Sandy Bridge-EP processors. It is driven by Intel C600 "Patsburg" chipset with up to 8 SCU ports and 2 SATA 6 Gb/s ports. There are no standard expansion slots on the board as such, but there are two PCI-Express 3.0 x48 risers, to which daughterboards with three x16 slots each, can be attached (as shown in the CGI drawing below). Apart from these PCIe x48 risers, there is one PCIe 3.0 x8 I/O module on board. The board features dual Intel LAN with VT support. KVM and BMT logic is in-built. The Server Board S4600LH from Intel will be available in Q2 2012.

We sourced a presentation, allegedly by Intel, detailing its Sandy Bridge-EP platform, and giving out early performance figures. After successful and trouble-free launches of its Sandy Bridge architecture across all PC form-factors, including the recently-launched Core i7 "Sandy Bridge-E" HEDT (high-end desktop), Intel is taking the architecture to its ultimate market, enterprise, where processors derived from it will make up new lines of Intel Xeon processor families. Intel has two branches of enterprise variations the architecture, Sandy Bridge-EN, designed for high-density, low-power servers, and Sandy Bridge-EP, designed for high-performance servers and workstations. Sandy Bridge-EP is multi-socket capable.

Sandy Bridge-EP uses essentially the same piece of silicon as Sandy Bridge-E, but enabled with several of its features otherwise off limits to the Core processor family. These include twoQuickPath Interconnect (QPI) links, which facilitate high-bandwidth inter-socket communication in multi-socket systems, up to eight cores, sixteen threads enabled by HyperThreading, and up to 20 MB of L3 cache memory. Like its Core family cousins, Xeon Sandy Bridge-EP packs a quad-channel DDR3 integrated memory controller, and PC3-12800 (DDR3-1600 MHz) is its optimal memory standard, but unlike it, supporting up to 768 GB of memory (by two sockets, eight DDR3 channels in all, LRDIMMs). Other key features are listed in the first slide below.Performance figures follow.

NVIDIA today announced that, for the second year in a row, the world's most energy efficient petaflop-class supercomputer is powered by NVIDIA Tesla GPUs.

The Tsubame 2.0 system at the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Global Scientific Information Center (GSIC) ranks as the greenest petaflop-class supercomputer on the recently released Green500 list. Published twice annually, the Green500 list, rates the 500 most energy efficient supercomputers based on performance achieved relative to power consumed.

Tsubame 2.0 is a heterogeneous supercomputer (combining both CPUs and GPUs) used to accelerate a range of scientific and industrial research in Japan. With sustained performance of 1.19 petaflops per second while consuming 1.2 megawatts, Tsubame 2.0 delivers 958 megaflops of processing power per watt of energy. It is 3.4-times more energy efficient than the next-closest x86 CPU-only petaflop system, the Cielo Cray supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which delivers 278 megaflops per watt.

The latest Sandy Bridge-E 6 core processors have just been released, to excellent reviews. However, the architecture is designed for 8 cores, so these current i7-3960X & i7-3930K processors actually contain those 8 cores, but with two turned off in order to enable them to fit within a manageable 130 W power envelope. Hence there's quite a bit more potential to be released and soon. Therefore, anyone looking to invest in the premium-priced SB-E platform right now, should note that these processors are at the initial C1 stepping and have the VT-d hardware virtualization issue and PCI-E 3.0 compatibility uncertainty. The VT-d problem will be a real show stopper where hardware acceleration of a virtual machine is a must, so it shouldn't be ignored.

VR-ZONE brings us news that the fully unlocked SB-E 8 core chips will be released as the long awaited Xeon E5 family of processors, which will be built on the C2 stepping, solving the above issues. However, being 8 core, these will be very power hungry indeed, consuming around 150 W at just 3 GHz with all 8 cores active and 20 MB of L3 cache. At 2.5 GHz though, the new processors are expected to fit within the 95 W power envelope.

At SC11, Intel Corporation revealed details about the company's next-generation Intel Xeon processor-based and Intel Many Integrated Core (Intel MIC)-based platforms designed for high-performance computing (HPC). The company also outlined new investments in research and development that will lead the industry to Exascale performance by 2018.

During his briefing at the conference, Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of Technical Computing, Intel Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, said that the Intel Xeon processor E5 family is the world's first server processor to support full integration of the PCI Express 3.0 specification**. PCIe 3.0 is estimated** to double the interconnect bandwidth over the PCIe* 2.0 specification** while enabling lower power and higher density server implementations. New fabric controllers taking advantage of the PCI Express 3.0 specification will allow more efficient scaling of performance and data transfer with the growing number of nodes in HPC supercomputers.

At the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC), Kirk Skaugen, Intel Corporation vice president and general manager of the Data Center Group, outlined the company's vision to achieve ExaFLOP/s performance by the end of this decade. An ExaFLOP/s is quintillion computer operations per second, hundreds times more than today's fastest supercomputers.

Reaching exascale levels of performance in the future will not only require the combined efforts of industry and governments, but also approaches being pioneered by the Intel Many Integrated Core (Intel MIC) Architecture, according to Skaugen. Managing the explosive growth in the amount of data shared across the Internet, finding solutions to climate change, managing the growing costs of accessing resources such as oil and gas, and a multitude of other challenges require increased amounts of computing resources that only increasingly high-performing supercomputers can address.

Lenovo today announced two new additions to the ThinkServer family - the TS130 and the TS430 - that give small-to-medium businesses and corporate branch offices a performance boost and powerful manageability tools. A perfect fit for businesses with few or no IT staff, they feature the latest Intel Xeon processor technology, are loaded with remote management tools and offer easy setup.

Lenovo also announced the ThinkCentre M71e, an entry-level desktop to give mainstream corporate offices the technologies they need to conduct business productively, securely and reliably every day. The desktop features 2nd generation Intel Core i processors, rapid boot up and security authentication features.

Apple announced that Mac OS X Lion, the eighth major release of the world's most advanced operating system with more than 250 new features and 3,000 new developer APIs, will be available to customers in July as a download from the Mac App Store for $29.99. Some of the amazing features in Lion include: new Multi-Touch gestures; system-wide support for full screen apps; Mission Control, an innovative view of everything running on your Mac; the Mac App Store, the best place to find and explore great software, built right into the OS; Launchpad, a new home for all your apps; and a completely redesigned Mail app.

"The Mac has outpaced the PC industry every quarter for five years running and with OS X Lion we plan to keep extending our lead," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "The best version of OS X yet, Lion is packed with innovative features such as new Multi-Touch gestures, system-wide support for full screen apps, and Mission Control for instantly accessing everything running on your Mac."