Intel wants to squeeze ARM out of server market with Xeon D

By Desire Athow

Intel has pulled the curtains on the latest additions to its server-focused Xeon family with immediate availability.

The Xeon Processor D fills a gap between the low-end Atom-based C2750 and the mainstream Xeon E5 range and looks destined to reinforce Intel’s formidable armada as competition from ARM (via Cavium, Calxeda, Applied Micro and AMD) heats up.

With the Xeon D, Intel moves the focus from the Data Center edge to the Network edge, a clear threat to ARM’s established partners like Freescale, Broadcom or Marvell.

Amongst the target products are edge routers, microservers wireless base stations, network and security appliances as well as entry-level NAS and SANs.

And Intel is coming out with all guns blazing with more than 50 design wins expected on the Xeon Processor D range, including the likes of Cisco, NEC, HP, QCT, Sugon and Supermicro.

The Xeon D range consists of two models, the 1520 and the 1540, both of which have a 45W TDP and are system-on-chip solutions. They’re based on the Broadwell architecture (Haswell shrink and 14nm manufacturing process).

First Broadwell server chip

Intel says that the more powerful of the two, the 1540, has eight cores, with 16 threads and is clocked at 2GHz.

The company quotes a …read more

Source: techradar.com – Computing Components