Intel's Xeon E7 processor group

he rockstar," says Thomas M Kilroy , senior VP and general manager, sales and marketing group at Intel - responsible for all the chipmaker's sales and marketing globally. Kilroy is referring to Ravishankar Kuppuswamy, engineering director at Intel Architecture Group in India, who led the design efforts behind Intel's newest Xeon E7 high-end processor for servers. The processor is the second major chip to be designed by the India development centre after the Dunnington in 2008.

Xeon E7, released worldwide in April and launched this week in India, delivers 40% better performance than the previous generation of processors, says Intel. "In the beginning, the India centre was helping out the bigger, broader and more experienced teams. Then under Tom's (Thomas Kilroy) leadership, we first built the Dunnington," says Kuppuswamy. Kilroy led the digital enterprise group, which represented Intel's development efforts across business clients, servers and products, from 2005 to 2009.

"Now, we've taken it one step further because the E7 is more complex than the Dunnington. So if you were to look in the vector of increasing complexity while delivering higher performance and better power efficiency.

The E7 platform's stepped ahead in some cases but Itanium has its own ecosystem.There are mission-critical usages of the Itanium all across the globe. So if you look at stock exchanges,they may be running on Itanium. We are very much committed to Itanium. Even though the volumes are small,it is steady and a very important customer base. We can't confuse strategic importance to volume," says Kilroy.

T