TechPulse 360

Intel server chip chief Kirk Skaugen confirmed the imminent release of the company's first 6-core chip since the ill-fated Dunnington

At a security event last night in San Francisco, Intel vice-president Kirk Skaugen confirmed the release date of Intel’s next-generation lineup of 32-nm Xeon server processors, including the first six-core Xeon chips since 2008 (Dunnington).

“In about 2 weeks it’s highly anticipated that we’ll be announcing this Westmere processor… When you buy that [chip], you should be able to get your return in about 5 months. But we’re probably most excited about – relative to just another crank of energy and performance – is the security features that are going into the processor,”told Skaugen to reporters during a media event hosted by security company RSA.

Scheduled in March 16, Intel will release a dozen dual-socket, 32nm Xeon processors as well a workstation version (Core i7) of the six-core chip.

“But what probably we’re most excited about – relative to another crank of energy and performance – is the [2] security features that are going into the processor,” added Skaugen.

The 2 new security features included in the Westmere line are:

1. 7 new instructions call AES-NI, that will deliver encryption and decryption up to 9 times faster and up to 2 times more SSL functions than in the past;
2. Trusted eXecution Technology (TXT) that is integrated in the processor, the chipset and Intel motherboards. “So for example, if you’re using VMotion to dynamically move a workload from a server to another, you want to set policies that say “I’m only going to move a workload to a server I know the secure root of trust has been verified… So, if I’m on a non trusted server I won’t be allowed to run [an application] on a trusted server, and vice-versa… all these kind of policies can be set up at the cloud level through the software that will be enabled on top of these new hardware,” said Skaugen.

Intel claims cloud domination

The Intel executive also provided reporters with some interesting statistics:

1. a little under 40% of the world’s servers today are still single core;
2. Xeon servers represent about 90% of the cloud infrastructure.

“With this new chip, everything that you know and love about Intel on energy efficiency, you’ll still get. So you can retire 15 single core servers and put in one Westmere server that is going to have the same performance, but you also going to get the trusted execution technology that can deliver that new secure root of trust,” concluded Skaugen.

Follows is a video excerpt of Skaugen comments: