The Computing Powers Of Intel Xeon CPU
With the ever changing and developing computer market, the companies have to be innovative at all times and offer the customers the best in every line of their products. The Intel Xeon CPU offers great processing speeds and is one step above the technology of the earlier Pentium-4 processor chips. Intel has recently launched its first processors which support AMD AMD64 type of architecture making them venture into the venerable x86 ISA. By launching x86 into native 64-bit processing, AMD64 came up with a physical CPU in 2003 and introduced their Opteron series of server CPUs which swiftly became an established name in the market.
Since the introduction of the first Opteron CPUs, everyone in the market has waited with eager anticipation to see whether Intel could produce a well-matched processor that used the ISA. The ultimate introduction of the Intel Xeon CPU, the industry has got one of the best and most competitive processor chips to have hit the market in a long time. The following are some of the features of the Intel Xeon CPU:
- Processor Information ROM (P.I. ROM): It contains data defining electrical characteristics of the core and L2 cache, e-signature, processor stepping etc.
- Scratch EEPROM: This particular processor chip is offered by Intel to OEM companies who can record the desired data according to their needs. Moreover, it can even be used by the system to store data on a computer, default settings, processor etc. The availability of this ROM is a great universal feature in any Xeon based system. - Machine Check Architecture (MCA): It is a processor subsystem that searches and finds faults in operation pertaining to the system logic. It also controls faults of mainly 5 basic subsystems which are: Translation Look-aside Buffer, External and internal bus, cache and Instruction Fetch Unit. This can be used in a multitude of different cases, like the information on failures can be read by the server operating system. - Hyper-Threading: It is a technology of performance increasing in multitask systems introduced and developed by Intel. This feature makes it possible to create two logical CPUs on only a single processor by implementing in a parallel way, two threads which use similar different processor units. This technology has appeared first in the Prestonia based Intel Xeon CPU It can become very clear as to what the experts of the Xeon team wanted if you look at the units carefully. Desktop users might even consider this unnecessary, but there is a sphere where reliability and compatibility are the primary things. And being flexible is more desirable than insufficiency. Taking into account the price of the newer and more advanced systems, it is far better to let the system use information from P.I. ROM. all these functional units have been specifically made to prevent any failures in such an expensive system. It can be quite clear to see the actual key difference between the Athlon MP and Pentium III-S on one side and Xeon on the other. The former are just some modifications of desktop processors for SMP systems while the latter, the Intel Xeon CPU contains units found in powerful server CPUs.
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