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Intel completed the transition to its award-winning “Nehalem” chip design last night with the launch of the Intel® Xeon® 7500 processor series. The new processors, were introduced to London’s financial community, alongside the recently released Intel® Xeon® 5600 processor series, at Intel’s “fasterCITY” event, 17th in a now established series of quarterly market briefings, attended by more than 130 CTOs, MDs, and IT heads from leading financial institutions, banks and brokers.
At the event, Nomura spoke of its experience with early releases of the products. Anthony Warden, ED Global Head of Algorithmic Trading and Quant Prime Broker Technology states: “Nomura’s ongoing investment in next-generation technology is a critical component of its low latency execution services strategy for clients. Early analysis of the latest Xeon 5600 processor, gained through our partnership with Intel, has shown an up to 35% improvement in latency. This is due to the faster clock, increased core count and increased Level 3 cache size. The Xeon 7500 processor allows us to support high bursts of order -flow at peak trading times without any increase in response times. It also helps to fit more workload into the same rack space and therefore achieve better value from exchange CoLocation facilities.”
Both of these new processor families are expected to bring significant benefits to the financial services industry in terms of lowering latency and dramatically increasing order throughput. Expandable to include from two to 256 chips per server, the Intel Xeon 7500 processors have an average performance three times that of Intel’s existing Xeon 7400 series on common, leading IT enterprise benchmarks, and come equipped with more than 20 new reliability features. This helps to achieve impressive throughput which will handle the vast data loads for today’s risk management.
The Xeon 5600 processor is the next generation to the highly successful Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series and can deliver up to 60% performance improvement over the Xeon 5500. The extra speed comes thanks to Intel’s industry-leading 32nanometre manufacturing technology that improves processor performance and reduces energy consumption. This makes them ideal for deployment in trading environments precisely due to the faster processing speeds and latency reductions demanded by latency sensitive trading.
Nigel Woodward, Director of Financial Services, Intel Corporation, said: “I am delighted that fasterCITY London was able to mark the arrival of the new Intel® Xeon® 7500 Series and Intel® Xeon® processor 5600 Series processors to the international financial community. I am equally delighted that we have been able to work with Nomura to show these products working successfully in the context of today’s trading conditions.”
