Xeon 5500 to maintain Intel leadership

Intel has launched its flagship products for this year, the Intel Xeon Processor 5500 series, in the expectation of maintaining its majority market share by providing an Intel-processor base for about 80 per cent of the 50,000 servers forecast to be sold in Thailand in 2009.

The company claims the launch of the Xeon 5500 series is the most important server launch since the first Intel-based server processor, Intel Pentium Pro, was introduced 15 years ago. The Xeon 5500 will provide an intelligent platform and intelligent choice for targeted customers dealing with huge volumes of data, and as many as 15 billion devices will be connected to the servers under cloud-computing architecture by 2015, it said.

Intel Microelectronics (Thailand) country manager Accharas Ouysinprasert said the quad core Xeon 5500 series, based on Nehalem architecture, offered three key improvements: speed, performance, and energy efficiency.

"These are a new generation of intelligent server processors designed to offer opportunities of scale with a single design. Performance is improved by 75 to 100 per cent; they are 1.75 to 2.25 times faster; and power consumption in idle time is reduced by 50 per cent to only 10 Watts. When working, the Xeon 5500 series consumes 50 per cent less power than the previous Xeon 5400 series," Accharas said.

Intel has had a presence in server markets for a decade and a half, since the launch of the Intel Pentium Pro, when it gained a 20-per-cent share of the total server market. Currently, Intel has risen to an 80-per-cent share of the global and local server markets.

This year, the total global server market is expected to reach 8 million units, and the Thai server market, 50,000 units. The Xeon 5500 series will help to maintain Intel's share of the market at 80 per cent and more, he said

Accharas said the Xeon 5500 series was designed with concept of an adaptive platform, to help customers deal efficiently with the new environment of data computing, which was both huge and complicated. On average, it helps software applications to perform two to three times better. It is suitable for serving dynamic data centres and currently there are 70 hardware vendors and 200 software platforms supporting the Xeon 5500 series.

"We expected that Xeon 5500 will encourage the server consolidation trend as it offers better performance gain, reduced footprint and space and better power efficiency," Accharas said.

He said the Thailand IT market this year was expected to grow at around 5 per cent. In the server market, the key competition will come from price, performance and server consolidation, as more and more and businesses establish a presence on the Internet.

The desktop market is also still growing in the first-time buyers segment and in the provincial markets, especially the big cities such as Chiang Mai, Hat Yai and Khon Kaen. The notebook market is still increasing in the replacement market.

"A big portion of the IT market in Thailand this year is still the consumer segment, so negative factors, both economic and political, might affect IT spending, but only in the short term. The overall Thai IT market is expected to grow," Accharas said.