Intel Woodcrest shows its speed

Intel's upcoming Xeon 5100 chip, due in June, promises a significant performance hike

Intel’s benchmarks suggest its Woodcrest server chip offers up to 125 percent better performance than previous dual-core Xeons.

Intel last week confirmed Woodcrest will ship in June, renamed as the Xeon processor 5100 series. It is expected to be available at speeds up to 3GHz, with the fastest chips featuring a 1,333MHz system bus.

The chips use Intel’s Core architecture, with 4MB of L2 cache shared between dual-processor cores. “Performance and [low] system-level power consumption … exceeded expectations,” said Kirk Skaugen, vice-president of Intel’s Server Platforms Group.

Intel said a Dell PowerEdge server running two 3GHz Xeon 5100s set a new world record, scoring 123 under the SPECint_rate_base2000 test.