Power Comparison of Dell PowerEdge 2950 using Intel X5355 and E5345 Quad Core Xeon Processors (60 KB)

The datacenter of today is a much different place than it was a decade ago. In the early days of x86 datacenter build out, much of the focus was on density in terms of space. Datacenter IT Managers were concerned with the physical size of a server and how many would fit in a rack. How much power these systems would consume was an afterthought. Power was cheaper, systems didn’t require as much of it, and it was easy to make additional power available to a rack.

Today, power is not cheap, systems use more of it, and it is not easy to bring additional power resources into the datacenter. Many datacenters are constrained by the amount of power that is available. IT Managers are faced with the dilemma of increasing datacenter workload without expanding or increasing the datacenter. Performance per watt is now a major focus in the datacenter.

This paper will compare the performance of the PowerEdge 2950 using two different quad-core Intel® Xeon® processors that consume different amounts of power. Results will show that the Intel Xeon E5300 family of processors can approach the performance of the X5300 series of processors while realizing a power savings of approximately 15%.