New Intel Pentium Chip Headed for Low Cost Servers

[btarunr]

Intel started shipping the new Pentium 350, a model designed specifically for low-cost servers, micro-servers, and home servers; a segment Intel originally planned to address with some of its Atom dual-core chips. The Pentium 350 is an offshoot from entry-level desktop and notebook platforms the Pentium brand is currently in charge of, it is designed with durability and energy-efficiency required by servers in mind.

Available in the LGA1155 package, Pentium 350 is a dual-core processor based on the 32 nm Sandy Bridge dual-core silicon. It is clocked at 1.20 GHz, and features 3 MB of shared L3 cache apart from 256 KB L2 cache per core. Thanks to its low clock speed, the chip's TDP is rated at just 15W, making it ideal for home and small business servers. It will naturally benefit from the high IPC of Sandy Bridge architecture. The chip features Intel64 instruction set, its integrated memory controller supports up to 32 GB of dual-channel DDR3-1066/DDR3-1333 MHz memory.

Its on-chip graphics controller is disabled (so it relies on the one server boards come with, or any discrete graphics card). Moving on to its feature-set, HyperThreading Technology is available, enabling 4 logical CPUs for the operating system to deal with. The latest AVX instruction set is lacking, though SSE instruction sets up to SSE4.2 are available. VT-x finds room. Fast memory access, flex memory access, and NX-bit wrap it up. There is no word on the retail pricing.

[Completely Bonkers]

This is excellent news. While Atom based servers are quite fine for basic/private webservers, mediaservers, fileservers etc they don't have the oomphf to do the kind of work the typical small business wants, e.g. mail servers AND scan services AND folder watching OCR or play with virtual etc. This P350 hits the gap nicely. What price?

[D4S4]

me thinks that this chip could be a epic overclocker.

[xaira]

good thing i held off on getting the G440

[1c3d0g]

I would love to see this thing in a well-made nettop/htpc. I'd buy 2 of them in an instant!

[Nesters]

How are these Sandybridge Pentiums overclocking?

[Maban]

Originally Posted by Nesters

How are these Sandybridge Pentiums overclocking?

Best you'd be able to get that thing is about 1.26GHz since It doesn't feature an unlocked multiplier.

[theJesus]

I didn't read a single bit, but Intel should really get rid of the Pentium brand name, imo, there's too much negativity associated with it still.

[theonedub]

Originally Posted by theJesus

I didn't read a single bit, but Intel should really get rid of the Pentium brand name, imo, there's too much negativity associated with it still.

Maybe if your first experience with it was the P4, but for those who have been around computers for a bit longer, the Pentium name is not completely trashed.

[newtekie1]

Originally Posted by theJesus

I didn't read a single bit, but Intel should really get rid of the Pentium brand name, imo, there's too much negativity associated with it still.

People should stop buying things based on name.

[D4S4]

Originally Posted by Maban

Best you'd be able to get that thing is about 1.26GHz since It doesn't feature an unlocked multiplier.

:facepalm:

oh well, if it had an unlocked multi... completely forgot about that. bu i bet it would hit a 200% overclock easily.

[Thefumigator]

Originally Posted by newtekie1

People should stop buying things based on name.

+1
that's why pentium brand may or may not stay.

What I worry the most is the vision brand, because it didn't change since it was released, and now you can't notice old laptops featuring a 3200IGP from newer 4250 IGP laptops, as example. Even some AMD C-50 laptops(14" and 15") have the red sticker and people associated the vision brand with "performance in games or multimedia", while we all know C-50 is pretty weak... Vision should at least change to "Vision 2" or change the color or something.

[theJesus]

Originally Posted by theonedub

Maybe if your first experience with it was the P4, but for those who have been around computers for a bit longer, the Pentium name is not completely trashed.

Right, but I think the problem is with people who don't do their own research and reviews, etc. but just go off what they've heard in the past.

Originally Posted by newtekie1

People should stop buying things based on name.

They most certainly should, but you and I both know that's never going to happen.

[newtekie1]

Originally Posted by theJesus

Right, but I think the problem is with people who don't do their own research and reviews, etc. but just go off what they've heard in the past.

They most certainly should, but you and I both know that's never going to happen.

In that case, they will flock to the Pentium name, the people that don't care to do research generally didn't have a problem with the P4/Pentium D line, they worked fine for what they used them for. But these are the same people that think Pentium is still the best processor ever, because that is the way it was back in the day.

[Apocalypsee]

Using Pentium name is quite annoying, I'm having a hard time explaining my Pentium P6200 laptop CPU isn't based on old Pentium architecture but based on Arrandale.

[hanzi]

People should stop buying things based on name.

That's hard. Try that reasoning to Apple fanboys

[newtekie1]

Originally Posted by Apocalypsee

Using Pentium name is quite annoying, I'm having a hard time explaining my Pentium P6200 laptop CPU isn't based on old Pentium architecture but based on Arrandale.

If the person you are explaining it to can't understand it, then you probably shouldn't be wasting time explaining it to them.

[MikeMurphy]

Originally Posted by theJesus

I didn't read a single bit, but Intel should really get rid of the Pentium brand name, imo, there's too much negativity associated with it still.

Guess what?

Intel doesn't base their marketing on the <1% of the world who are computer savvy;. They focus on the other 99%.

The 99% don't know and don't care if the Pentium 4 underperformed.

[MikeMurphy]

What are the price on these?

Too bad its lacking a GPU.

[HalfAHertz]

Originally Posted by theJesus

I didn't read a single bit, but Intel should really get rid of the Pentium brand name, imo, there's too much negativity associated with it still.

Bah I still remember the days in which i had a crappy Cyrix 486 and dreamt of a Pentium Pro...

[Completely Bonkers]

A business trip to Singapore and a trip to Funan centre (high rise computer centre full of independent PC makers and component sellers) and I got me a nice cheap (well actually, that is a relative term. Hotdamn it was expensive) AMD K6-III and TNT2. The CPU was pin compatible with the 486 and BLEW it away, even the original Pentium Pro I do believe. And that TNT2? Best in class at the time. Completely nailed the Compaq's GPU it replaced.

But, 3 months later... that expensive AMD K6-III without thermal management burnt itself out.

Never bought AMD again.

Amazing how experiences, both good or bad, affect someone's purchase behaviour FOR YEARS.

[TRWOV]

bummer... Cpu World says that these will ship with OEM servers only

http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2011/2...available.html

[Inceptor]

Wait long enough, and they'll become available to purchase outside of OEM builds.

[newtekie1]

Originally Posted by Inceptor

Wait long enough, and they'll become available to purchase outside of OEM builds.

I don't know about that. I was waiting for the G1101 to become available for purchase outside of the OEM channel, and it never did. So the prices to buy it second-hand were higher than buying a brand-new faster processor direct from newegg...