Dell announced three PowerEdge servers with Xeon E7 chips, which deliver up to a 49 percent improvement in performance-per-watt compared to their predecessor, said Brian Payne, executive director of Dell's PowerEdge server line.

Dell's four-socket PowerEdge R910 4U rack server, when configured with a 10-core Intel Xeon E7-4780 CPU running at 2.4GHz, can provide up to 38 percent improvement in Oracle application server and database performance over a previous-generation, eight-core Intel Xeon X7560 processor running at 2.26GHz, the company claimed.

The entry-level price for a PowerEdge R910 server is around US$9,000, a Dell spokesman said.

Dell also announced that E7 chips would be offered with the PowerEdge M910 blade and PowerEdge R810 rack servers.

HP updated four servers in its ProLiant G7 line to include Xeon E7 chips. The ProLiant BL680c and ProLiant DL580 will include the Xeon E7-4800 family of chips, while the ProLiant BL620c and ProLiant DL980 servers will be based on the Intel Xeon E7-2800 and E7-4800 series processors.