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Intel has begun shipping 'Sossaman', the 65nm Core Duo-derived low-voltage Xeon processor it announced in July 2005. The chip giant is pitching the part, which it claims consumes no more than 31W, at 1U-rack and blade servers, along with network-attached storage (NAS) and communication applications-oriented boxes.

Sossaman - or Xeon LV, to give the chip its go-to-market name - runs at 2GHz across a 667MHz frontside bus. The two cores share the 2MB of on-die L2 cache. It's got Enhanced SpeedStep to drop back core voltage and clock frequency depending on workload to reduce power consumption even further, the chip maker claimed. Intel is also offering a 1.66MHz version.

The chips connects via a 478-pin interconnect to Intel's E7520 server chipset with which it can address up to 16GB of physical 400MHz DDR 2 memory.

Intel claimed the part delivers four times the performance-per-Watt of its existing 2.8GHz LV Xeon CPU, itself based on the company's Pentium 4 core. The new chip is 2.2 times faster than the 2.8GHz part, Intel claimed, based on specint_rate_base2000 benchmark results.

The 2GHz Xeon LV costs $423, the 1.66GHz version $209. Both are available now, Intel said.

The REGhARDware