Intel released their 5600 CPUs today, first saw an announcement on Supermicro’s site last night(there’s a dozen or two vendors whom I prowl their sites regularly). I couldn’t help but get a sense of deja vu when it came to new Intel 6-core CPUs. It seems just yesterday^W nearly 2 years ago that they released their first hex core processor, the Xeon 7000 series. Yeah I know clock for clock these new chips are much faster, new cores, more threads etc. But purely from a core perspective..why might anyone want to go buy one of these new 5600 series systems, with the new 8 core chips coming in a couple of weeks, and AMD’s new 8 and 12 core chips coming at about the same time?
I think Intel got screwed on this one, mostly screwed by their OEMs. That is, many (most? all?) of the large OEMs have adapted the upcoming 8 core Intel chips which were intended for 4-socket and greater systems to run in dual socket configurations, something Intel obviously didn’t think of when they were designing this new 5600 series chip. On the same note I never understood why the 7000 series of chips never made it into dual socket systems, but oh well it doesn’t matter now.
I think short of an upgrade cycle for existing 5500 series systems probably next year(since the new 5600s are socket compatible, and given the 5500s are so new I can’t imagine many customers needing to upgrade so soon), I think the 5600 is a dead product.