Intel Xeon® Processor X5550 (8M Cache, 2.66 GHz, 6.40 GT/s QPI) BX80602X5550 User Manual

Product codes
BX80602X5550
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Automating Energy Efficiency
After decades of IT buildout, server sprawl is escalating system 
management costs and outstripping available data center space, 
power and cooling capabilities. In a recent survey, 42 percent of data 
center owners said they would exceed power capacity within the next 
12-24 months, and 39 percent said they would exceed cooling capac-
ity in the same timeframe.
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  Energy efficiency is becoming a critical 
issue in the data center.
Intel Microarchitecture Nehalem helps lower energy costs with auto-
mated energy-efficiency features that deliver a 5x improvement in 
power management capabilities from the first Intel® quad-core server 
processors: 5x as many operating states, a 5x reduction in idle power, 
and 5x faster transitions to and from low-power states.
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 Intel Intelligent 
Power Technology puts power management in all platform components: 
the processor, chipset, and memory, enabling operating systems to put 
processor power and memory into the lowest available states needed 
to support current workloads without compromising performance and 
allowing individual cores to be idled independent of the others. This 
combination of features enables the Intel Xeon processor 5500  
series to deliver up to 50 percent lower server idle power.
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Intel Intelligent Power Technology makes power available for critical 
workloads while conserving power where there is less demand, deliv-
ering as much as 2.25x more performance in a similar power envelope
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and dramatically reducing idle power.
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Maximizing Benefits from Virtualization
Intel is also building a better physical platform with unique hardware- 
assist features to enhance the virtual data center and help tame 
server sprawl. The Intel Xeon processor 5500 series, built on Intel 
Microarchitecture Nehalem, expands the benefits of virtualization 
with innovations that boost performance, increase consolidation 
ratios, and enable servers of different generations to be combined  
in the same virtualized server pool, improving virtual machine  
failover, load balancing, and disaster recovery capabilities. 
The new Intel Microarchitecture Nehalem, with next-generation  
Intel® Virtualization Technology
 (Intel® VT) enhances virtualization  
performance by up to 2.1x
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 and reduces roundtrip virtualization  
latency by up to 40 percent.
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•  Intel® Virtualization Technology (Intel VT-x) continues to offer 
investment protection and infrastructure flexibility with multi- 
generation VM migration across the full range of 32-bit and  
64-bit configurations, enabling bigger VM pools.
•  Intel® Virtualization Technology for Connectivity (Intel® VT-c)  
provides hardware-assisted I/O that accelerates network  
performance and simplifies VM migration. 
•  Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (Intel® VT-d) 
helps speed data movement and eliminates much of the performance 
overhead by giving designated VMs their own dedicated I/O devices, 
reducing the overhead of the VM migration in managing I/O traffic. 
Intel® Microarchitecture Nehalem helps 
lower energy costs with automated energy-
efficiency features that put processor power 
and memory into the lowest available states 
needed to support current workloads without 
compromising performance.
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