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Intel Cuts Power Consumption Rating Of "Skulltrail Xeon"

May 16, 2008 by Wolfgang Gruener
Source: Tom's Hardware US – Keywords: skulltrail, intel, xeon
Categories: INTEL




Santa Clara (CA) - Intel is transitioning all of its 45 nm Xeon DP processors from the C-O to the E-0 stepping. There are no changes in the feature set of the Harpertown quad core CPUs and Wolfdale dual-core processors, with the exception of the flagship model, which is the sister model of the company’s Skulltrail processor Core 2 Extreme QX9775. The thermal design power (TDP) rating of the Xeon X5482 drops by 20%.

According to a product change notification sent to Intel customers yesterday, all 18 current 45 nm Xeon processors are transitioned to the new stepping with first samples expected to become available on July 3. The updated processors are scheduled to begin shipping on October 6 and Intel asks its customers to be prepared to receive these CPUs by October 20 of this year.

Since there are no new features and (almost) no specification changes, Intel says that only "minimal re-qualification" will be required on the system builder side. However, the new chips will require a BIOS update.

The only CPU that does see specification change is the Xeon DP X5482: According to Intel, the 3.2 GHz chips carries a 120 watt TDP rating in the E-O stepping, compared to a 150 watt rating in the C-O version. The