Saturday, November 26, 2011

New Intel Pentium Chip Headed for Low Cost Servers

Intel started shipping the new Pentium 350, a model designed specifically for low-cost servers, micro-servers, and home servers; a segment Intel originally planned to address with some of its Atom dual-core chips. The Pentium 350 is an offshoot from entry-level desktop and notebook platforms the Pentium brand is currently in charge of, it is designed with durability and energy-efficiency required by servers in mind.

Available in the LGA1155 package, Pentium 350 is a dual-core processor based on the 32 nm Sandy Bridge dual-core silicon. It is clocked at 1.20 GHz, and features 3 MB of shared L3 cache apart from 256 KB L2 cache per core. Thanks to its low clock speed, the chip's TDP is rated at just 15W, making it ideal for home and small business servers. It will naturally benefit from the high IPC of Sandy Bridge architecture. The chip features Intel64 instruction set, its integrated memory controller supports up to 32 GB of dual-channel DDR3-1066/DDR3-1333 MHz memory.

Its on-chip graphics controller is disabled (so it relies on the one server boards come with, or any discrete graphics card). Moving on to its feature-set, HyperThreading Technology is available, enabling 4 logical CPUs for the operating system to deal with. The latest AVX instruction set is lacking, though SSE instruction sets up to SSE4.2 are available. VT-x finds room. Fast memory access, flex memory access, and NX-bit wrap it up. There is no word on the retail pricing.

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