Fidessa is reporting trading transaction throughput tests on the new Intel Xeon 5500 chipset running twice as fast as on current industry standard kit, with comparatively lower power consumption.
Intel released the Xeon processor 5500 series earlier this week, claiming groundbreaking advances in performance, virtualisation and workload management.
Fidessa says testing and certification of the platform for the vendor's front office product suite offered significant improvements in speed and power consumption over the current offerings from leading manufacturers.
Philip Beevers, chief architect at Fidessa, comments: "Using the Solaris operating system, we saw our benchmark 'trading transaction' throughput test run twice as fast as on the current fastest processors, achieving a sustained level of over 7000 orders per second. In addition, the comparatively low power consumption of these processors for this level of performance makes them an extremely attractive proposition for efficient and cost effective use in data centres."
Similarly, low-latency vendor QuantHouse, reports that tests of its feed handler technology, used to standardise exchange raw market data feeds, is able to decode more than 3.3 millions messages per second using the new Intel series. The benchmark has been made at fasterLAB, the Intel low latency lab in London on several versions of the multicore Intel Xeon 5570 2.93Ghz platform.
Testifying at a launch event in New York, Scott Ross, executive director of high performance computing at UBS says the firm saw an average 70% performance increase for equities and a 250% gain in fixed income pricing and analytical applications, with no increase in power consumption.
The release of the new product line comes as analyst house Tabb estimates that financial markets firms invest an average of $1.8 billion annually on data centre space, power and cooling.
Eighty-two per cent of firms surveyed by Tabb ranked power as their most pressing concern, surpassing connectivity and cost.
Tabb analyst Kevin McPartland cites an example using a single blade server that consumes about 100 watts per hour, the same as an incandescent light bulb. With 30 blades per rack and an estimated 100 racks in a single data centre cage, 300,000 watts per hour would be used, approximately the same amount of power used by 3000 suburban homes in the US, excluding additional energy to heat and cool the servers. The 300,000 watts must then be multiplied by 24 hours, multiplied by seven days, multiplied by 365 days - all for one cage of one firm's data centre.
Reinforcing the point, he says: "Financial services data centres are the largest users of power in the State of New Jersey."