SEATTLE, WA, Mar 16, 2010 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) — Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced that its Cray CX1 line of deskside supercomputers will now ship with the Intel(R) Xeon(R) processor 5600 Series (formerly codenamed “Westmere-EP”). Intel’s next generation of intelligent server processors accelerates performance and saves energy.
With the addition of the new Intel Xeon processors series, the Cray CX1 line of deskside supercomputers now feature an Intel(R) Core(TM) microarchitecture built on the company’s latest 32nm process technology. The new microarchitecture features two more compute cores per socket (from four core to six core) while maintaining the same thermal footprint. Compared to the Intel(R) Xeon(R) processor 5550 series released last year, these new Intel Xeon processors add 50 percent more compute power but keep power and energy consumption levels flat.
“Today’s launch of the Intel Xeon Processor 5600 series marks the third generation of Intel technology that has been made available to customers of our deskside supercomputers since the launch of the original Cray CX1 system,” said Ian Miller, senior vice president of the productivity solutions group and marketing at Cray. “We are pleased to be able to once again offer our customers a significant upgrade in performance. An upgrade that reinforces our commitment to making world-class HPC performance available to an expanded user base that extends beyond the data center.”
First introduced in September 2008, the Cray CX1 line of deskside supercomputers are designed from the ground up to provide superior performance, functionality and cost for individuals and departmental workgroups who want to harness the compute power of an HPC cluster. Equipped with state-of-the-art visualization and storage capabilities, the Cray CX1 systems deliver performance leadership across a broad range of applications — all in a compact, deskside system.
“The combination of Cray’s CX1 systems and the new Intel Xeon processor 5600 series helps ensure HPC users can apply industry-leading supercomputing resources to solve difficult science and engineering problems,” said Richard Dracott, Intel Corporation’s General Manager of High Performance Computing. “Creating and delivering these tools is what the Intel and Cray collaboration is built on.”