Intel's announcement of the latest Xeon server chip family, the E5-2600, reveals how the market has changed and how much harder Intel is working to position it in this market. The company promises not only 80 percent improvement in processing power, but twice the bandwidth throughput, enhanced security and energy management. The enhanced throughput is the real story, according to ZDNet's David Chernicoff. The E5-2600 consumes 50 percent less power than its predecessor, the Xeon 5600 series, and will allow operators to track and manage power use in real time, CRN points out. And this new chip is better at encryption, offering a rate of 39.7 gigabits a second, about the amount of data in an animated feature film, according to The New York Times. It says:

Cloud architecture makes it hard to tell where computing ends and storage or networking begin, so Intel is positioning the E5 as a chip that can do it all. If so, that could make it attractive in big computer centers.

Actually Intel released the chip last fall to two sets of customers in that arena: users of supercomputers for scientific research and companies like Google that use massive data centers. Meanwhile, Intel's Diane Bryant, who announced the new chip, also said Intel was "not impressed" with "micro-server" vendor SeaMicro, which AMD recently bought. That prompted the headline in Wired, "Intel Says AMD’s New Baby Is Ugly."