SAN FRANCISO— Claiming a step toward minimizing the environmental footprint of its products, Intel Corp. Monday (Sept. 8) rolled out four halogen-free 45-nm Xeon processors and said all previously launched versions of the Xeon 5200 and 5400 series will now be halogen-free.
The new Xeons are drop-in compatible with existing Intel dual processor platforms that have been in the market since 2006, Intel said.
The halogen-free chips include three new quad-core Xeon 5400 series processors— X5492, X5470 and L5430. The fastest, the X5492, boasts a clock speed of 3.4 GHz, according to Intel. The low voltage L5430 draws only 50 watts of power, or just 12.5 watts per core, the company said.
The fourth chip, the X5270, is a dual-core Xeon that runs as low as 80 watts with frequencies as high as 3.5 GHz, Intel said.
Intel (Santa Clara, Calif.) said the processors achieve new heights in energy efficiency, thanks to their 45-nm implementation and transistors that use a hafnium-based high-k metal gate formula.
"Customers using these new Xeon processors will not only benefit from greater performance and energy efficiency within existing platforms, but they will be the very first to use Intel's halogen-free technology," said Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's server platforms group, in a statement.
Systems vendors supporting these new processors including Asus, Dell, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens, Gigabyte, HP, IBM, Microstar, NEC, Quanta, Rackable Systems Inc., Sun Microsystems, Supermicro, Tyan and Verari Systems, Intel said.
The new 5400 series processors are available now, while the X5270 will be available this fall, Intel said.
