Today is an exciting day for workstation users as we learn more about the introduction of Intel's new Xeon 3600/5600 Series (Westmere-EP) processors on our T3500, T5500 and T7500 single and dual-socket workstations.  These new processors are designed to improve the productivity of our customers with a variety of applications by delivering higher performance - which is the #1 Dell Precision design goal. 

I have had a chance to work with the new Xeon 3600 and 5600 Series for a while now.  Key features include support for up to 6 cores, increased on chip Level 3 shared cache memory to 12MB, and higher frequencies - especially with Turbo mode.

Having more processor cores come in handy when you are running digital content creation applications and you have very compute intensive rendering operations. Mechanical and electronic designers will find that they can also analyze their designs faster using threaded analysis applications which can scale across multiple processor cores, improving time to market for design projects. With Intel's HyperThreading feature on the dual-socket T5500 and T7500 workstations, a well threaded application can run on up to 24 cores - 12 physical and 12 virtual cores.  

The larger (12MB) Level 3 (on processor chip) cache memory on Westmere -EP can improve application performance when data is located in fast on chip memory vs. having to search standard memory or the hard drive. And if only one core is active, that core can have access to all 12MB of cache memory.

The new processors are available with speeds up to 3.46GHz for a quad core and 3.33GHz for the 6 core version. Since many workstation applications are not multi-threaded, they perform best with the highest clock speed CPU (core) available.  Intel's Turbo mode dynamically increases the clock speed of active core(s) when not all cores are active or when the processor is operating below its thermal and power consumption thresholds.  So, an application running on a single core could scale upward by two or three processor speed bumps (processor dependent) delivering maximum performance for its happy user.

In addition, T3500 and T5500 systems equipped with the Xeon 3600/5600 Series CPUs will have an improved hard drive tray design which can better accommodate third party graphics cards that have a supplementary power connector on top of the card. This modification was made as a direct result of customer feedback.