The new X5680 3.33GHz Intel® Xeon® Processor

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.