Intel’s Mighty Dual Xeon Beast – V8 Platform Preview

Two Xeon X5365 CPU’s and Eight Cores!

Just over one week into 2007 Intel kicked off the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas by showcasing a demo machine that was to be known as ‘V8’. It was a system that was prepared by Intel just to show the media that consumers could go build a dual-socket platform with Intel retail products just like what AMD was doing on their QuadFX system. The only difference between the two dual-socket ‘workstations’ was the fact that Intel used two quad-core processors and AMD only had two dual-core processors. This proved to be a crushing blow for AMD in a sense as they didn’t have anything to return fire with.

That was half a year ago and it seems that AMD still doesn’t have a quad-core processor on the market. For now, one can purchase two quad-core Intel Xeon X5365 processors (3.0GHz) and the Intel S5000XVN Workstation Board to create their own ‘V8’ system. The heart of the platform is the Intel 5000X-series chipset that powers the S5000XVN workstation board that utilizes FB-DIMM memory modules.

To fully understand and to witness this type of system we assembled one from scratch to see just what it could do. Using the same Intel S5000XVN Workstation Board that Intel showed off at CES and newer Intel Xeon X5365 processors along with 4GB of Samsung FB-DIMMs we set off to see just how fast this system really is against rival processors from both AMD and Intel. How do you think this system will do against the AMD QuadFX FX-74 system or the Core 2 Extreme QX6700 system? Sit back and put your five point racing harness on because this ‘V8’ has some serious torque even without being overclocked!