Acer Putting New Intel Xeon E5 Chips Into Its Veriton Servers

Acer became the latest server maker to announce support for Intel’s new Xeon E5-2600 v2 processors, which the chip maker announced Sept. 10 at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

Acer officials said Sept. 12 that the company is refreshing its line of Altos servers and Veriton workstations with the new “Ivy Bridge” processors, which Intel officials said offer as much as 50 percent more performance and 45 percent better energy efficiency than their predecessors. The new chips, which offer up to 12 processing cores, will help Acer as it looks to make gains into the competitive x86 server space.

“Our professional lineup of Altos servers is a cornerstone of our renewed focus on the commercial marketplace,” Evis Lin, associate vice president of commercial products and solutions management at Acer, said in a statement. “Now with complete support of Intel’s high-performance Xeon E5-2600 v2 CPUs, the Altos line is positioned perfectly to capitalize on channel and data center markets.”

Acer joins a growing lineup of system makers—including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Cray and SGI—that are looking to leverage the better performance and power efficiency of the new Intel processors.

IBM announced the new NeXtScale x86 system that will be armed with the E5-2600 v2 chips. The new systems will be aimed at such workloads as cloud computing, social media, analytics and technical computing in large data centers and cloud environments. HP officials said their two-processor ProLiant systems will be refreshed with the new chips.

“The next wave of ProLiant Gen8 innovations are designed to deliver the intelligence necessary to optimize your data center and accelerate performance to support a wide range of complex IT demands from Cloud-based applications to Social Media, Big Data, and Mobility in a virtualized environment,” HP officials wrote in a post on the company’s blog.

The 21 new processors within the E5-2600 v2 lineup are designed to address a wide range of data center workloads, from cloud computing to high-performance computing, and systems, including servers, storage appliances and networking devices.

Lenovo at IDF showed off its upcoming ThinkServer rack systems that will use the Xeon E5-2600 v2 chips, while Cray said its XC30 Series of systems and CS300 line of cluster supercomputers are available with the new chips and SGI is putting the processors into its ICE X supercomputers, Rackable servers and Modular InfiniteStorage systems.