In keeping with the ongoing Wall Street data center trends toward server consolidation, virtualization and reduction of energy costs, Intel says its latest round of server chips perform 50% better and use 10% less power than the previous generation of Caneland 7300 chips.With this Xeon 7400-based MP server line, Intel has completed its transition to using a more energy efficient hafnium process for all its chips.

To accommodate virtualization environments, Intel has introduced a feature called VT FlexMigration that, according to the company, lets firms build a single virtualization pool and conduct live VM migration across all Intel-based servers, allowing more flexible workload management. A new processor extension, Intel VT FlexPriority, improves interrupt handling. According to Intel, more than 50 manufacturers will be using these new chips in their servers, including Dell, Egenera, Fujitsu, Fujitsu-Siemens, Hitachi, HP, IBM, NEC, Sun, Supermicro and Unisys.

"This is great news for people who need to get a lot of work done in a complex environment and need to dramatically reduce that complexity," says Rick Jacobsen, director financial services marketing, Intel Americas. "It's a standard server with a dense form factor that can help you consolidate infrastructure while using the latest energy-efficient technology."