The new range-topping x86 PRIMERGY RX600 S4 rack server is immediately available for order, featuring the new Intel Xeon MP 7400 processor series, which is also introduced today. This combines four and six core processors with up to 16 MB of additional shared Level 3 cache to provide previously unreached performance levels.

The new PRIMERGY RX600 S4 server is designed for heavy lifting work, providing customers in the upper mid-market as well as large enterprises with an ideal platform for consolidating multiple systems or workloads on to fewer, more powerful servers. With huge memory capacity in an individual PRIMERGY RX600 S4 unit - up to 256GB of RAM available in a single chassis thanks to new 8GB memory modules to be introduced in the final quarter of 2008 - the four-socket servers are the perfect platform for running a bank of virtual machines and for backend services such as databases and e-commerce systems. They can also easily operate resource-hungry ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, and they are perfect for working with large databases, where exceptionally high levels of system resources are required.

The superiority of these servers could be seen in the recent TPC Benchmark E publication, a new On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) workload developed by the TPC. The PRIMERGY RX600 S4 with Intel Xeon X7460 Dunnington 6-core processors achieved very impressive results: a throughput of 721.40 tpsE (transactions per second TPC-E) and 459.71 $/tpsE. TPC-E tests were also performed on the PRIMERGY RX600 S4 with 4 x Intel Xeon X5350 (Tigerton, Quad-Core) plus 128GB memory, resulting in a throughput measurement of 492.34 tpsE and a price/performance ratio of 559.88 $/tpsE.

These outstanding results place the new PRIMERGY RX600 S4 servers in the number one spot with regard to price/performance ratio and establish both the Dunnington 7400 Series and the Tigerton 7300 Series as the best-in-class 4-socket servers with regard to throughput. In addition, the RX600 S4 earned a SPECint_rate2006 score of 277, the best result of any 4-socket system tested.

Customers who have already deployed PRIMERGY RX600 S4 servers can also benefit from better power economy, thanks to the increased performance and improved performance per Watt from the new six-core Xeon processors.

"Intesa San Paolo already had the chance to evaluate the new CPU with the six-core Intel Xeon MP 7400 processor series and especially appreciates its advantages with regard to price/performance ratio", stated Paolo Barraco, Branch Offices IT Manager at Italian banking group Intesa San Paolo. "The new processor technology will allow Intesa San Paolo to further develop and successfully deploy projects in the field of server consolidation."

Underlining the built-in future-proofing of its PRIMERGY line, the new Xeon chips are compatible with all RX600 S4 models, and can be retro-fitted to production servers deployed over the last 12 months.

"As Intel has introduced new members of the Xeon MP 7000 sequence over the last 18 months, we have seen progressive performance gains with multi-core processors, with the chips in today’s 7400 series delivering up to 56 percent more power than the Xeon MP 7300 series", stated Jens-Peter Seick, Senior Vice President, Enterprise Server Business at Fujitsu Siemens Computers.

"We recognized that large enterprise customers want to take advantage of the very real performance gains from the latest generation of multi-core processors, but are not necessarily ready to throw out their entire database and virtualization server farms in order to achieve these benefits. That is why we designed the PRIMERGY RX600 S4 series to offer snap-in upgradability for newer multi-core processors - so that over the last year, enterprises could start laying the foundations for today’s announcement from Intel. With the introduction of the latest Intel Xeon MP 7400 series processors, we have been able to unleash the most-powerful industry standard servers ever in the PRIMERGY family", added Jens-Peter Seick.