Posted on Saturday, May 17 2008 @ 2:00 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
TG Daily
reports Intel's Xeon DP 45nm processors with E-0 stepping will give the Xeon X5482 processor a 20% lower power consumption.
According to a product change notification sent to Intel customers yesterday, all 18 current 45 nm Xeon processors are transitioned to the new stepping with first samples expected to become available on July 3. The updated processors are scheduled to begin shipping on October 6 and Intel asks its customers to be prepared to receive these CPUs by October 20 of this year.
Since there are no new features and (almost) no specification changes, Intel says that only “minimal re-qualification” will be required on the system builder side. However, the new chips will require a BIOS update.
The only CPU that does see specification change is the Xeon DP X5482: According to Intel, the 3.2 GHz chips carries a 120 watt TDP rating in the E-O stepping, compared to a 150 watt rating in the C-O version. The current Skulltrail processor Core 2 Extreme QX9775 is also clocked at 3.2 GHz and rated at a 150 watt TDP.
We don’t know whether the power consumption of the processor in fact drops, or if the new TDP rating is simply a bit closer to reality. According to a review posted by Tom’s Hardware, a Core 2 Extreme QX9775 consumes a maximum of 114 watts at 3.2 GHz. The power consumption climbs to about 138 watts when overclocked to 3.6 GHz and 176 watts at 4 GHz.
