The advent of Gulftown less than a month ago most certainly has the professional community aghast with speculation - what will Westmere bring us all.  It was noted that the performance increase from Gulftown was most certainly spectacular - therefore what does Westmere bring to the fold.  With nearly one year to the date along comes Westmere bursting forth out the stable door at a speed only the finest bred Thoroughbreds can produce.    What we uncovered most certainly had us in awe at the utter raw performance within this mighty chip.  Amazed you will be.

What we see immediately in the differences from  Gainestown and Westmere are the additional  two  physical cores, bringing the total from four to six. As each physical core has a logical Hyper-Threaded core, this means each  Xeon 5600 CPU has 12 Threads to assault your applications.  Therefore the great Dual Xeon board will bring an almighty 24 threads to bear on any application.  Overall this is a huge advancement within the workstation and server work place.    As a further point of  note to compensate for  the four additional threads Intel has also increased the size of the shared Level 3 cache from 8MB to 12MB.

For those within the security industry you may want to buy a new motherboard, as Intel has added two new features to the CPU instruction set that are only supported by a new revision of the Intel 5520 motherboard chipset.    On going to print these mainboards are now readily available from most good suppliers.   These  new instructions, AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) and TXT (Trusted Execution Technology) offer increased data encryption and better protection against malware by running applications in their own memory space.  However for current users do not despair as with a simple bios upgrade,  the CPU is a drop in upgrade as we have completed it here on two mainboards and the performance WHOW

All 15 models of the Xeon 5600-series are based on the 32nm Westmere core and it is vitally imperative  to take note that not every model listed below has six cores.    Some of the low power models only have four cores, although they still retain the full 12MB of Level 3 cache.   The other point of note within the new model range is the quad core X5677, which is clocked at 3.46GHz.

Simply put - the need for speed with the added instructions to make many lives so much easier. 

Now completing the second part of our very special article we now move onwards to todays 2nd exclusive item - Western Digitals new 256GB Western Digital SiliconEdge™ Blue™ SSD

Page 1 - Introduction The ATI FirePro™ V8800 3D Workstation Graphics Accelerator
Page 2 - The new X5680 3.33GHz Intel® Xeon® Processor
Page 3 - The New Western Digital SiliconEdge Blue 256GB SSD
Page 4 - System's Set-Up and Software Used
Page 5 - Sandra 2010 and POVRAY on Westmere
Page 6 - WD 256GB SiliconEdge Blue SSD
Page 7 - Westmere - HyperThreading Switched Off
Page 8 - ATI FirePro™ V8800 and Gulftown
Page 9 - ATI FirePro™ V8800 and a Single 3.33GHz Intel® Xeon® W5590 Nehalem EP® System
Page 10 - ATI FirePro™ V8800 and a Dual 3.33GHz Intel® Xeon® X5680 Nehalem EP® (aka Westmere) System
Page 11 - SPECviewperf® 10.0 64-bit The ATI FirePro™ V8750 v The ATI FirePro™ V8800
Page 12 - Conclusions and Awards