Updated on March 30 at 1:50 p.m. PDT with additional information throughout.
Intel's Nehalem-architecture chips will now try to make their mark in servers, after debuting in desktops in November.
On Monday, Intel is rolling out new Nehalem-based Xeon models targeted at servers using up to two processors. Nehalem offers some important firsts for Intel, including an integrated memory controller for better performance, hyper-threading for up to 16 virtual cores (which improves multitasking), and Turbo Boost Technology, which dynamically increases the processor's frequency (speed), as needed.
Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president at Intel, speaks at Nehalem server chip launch Monday.
(Credit: Screen capture by Brooke Crothers)"Our most important server launch in well over a decade," said Intel Senior Vice President Pat Gelsinger, speaking on Monday at the Nehalem server chip launch event in San Francisco, which was streamed live over the Web. Gelsinger said Intel has already shipped hundreds of thousands of quad-core Xeon 5500 processors--which pack in just over 730 million transistors--to mostly high-performance computing customers. Gelsinger also said future 32-nanometer "Westmere" versions will have six cores and be essentially drop-in replacements for the current 45-nanometer Xeon 5500.
The announcement is anticlimactic to some extent. Apple has already announced a new Mac Pro using the Nehalem Xeon 5500 processor and last month Intel discussed how Nehalem will be used in new "Willowbrook" servers in mega data centers.
But fresh announcements were made Monday from the largest server suppliers in the world, including IBM. "You can get anywhere from a 20 percent to a 200 percent performance improvement going from (Intel's) existing 'Harpertown' processor," said Alex Yost, vice president IBM BladeCenter. IBM is the largest server supplier in the world based on revenue, holding about a 33 percent share of the market, according to Gartner.
"We did install a bunch of early systems at key clients on Wall Street and I am very encouraged," he said. Yost added, however, that at the processor level Nehalem offers virtually no difference in power savings over previous generations of Intel chips. Improved power efficiency can be achieved other ways, though: for example, using virtualization to condense many virtual servers into a single physical server or using more power-efficient motherboards. Moving from rack-based servers to blade servers can also boost power efficiency.
Dreamworks has also been a high-profile early adopter of Nehalem. Prior to Nehalem, Dreamworks had to wait overnight to get an animation rendering project completed but this can be done almost in real time with the new processor, according to Intel and Dreamworks.
Josh Crowe, vice president of engineering at Savvis, an outsourcing business, said Nehalem offers better virtualization technology for customers whose budgets "have been cut to next to nothing" because of the tough economic times. "The consolidation ratios are going to be massively improved," he said, referring to the ability to bring many virtual servers into one physical server box.
Analysts don't expect Nehalem to cause seismic shifts in chip market share because Intel processors already claim a disproportionate chunk of the server market. "We expect only an incremental upside on a unit basis," said Ashok Kumar, an analyst at investment bank Collins Stewart. More importantly, Kumar is closely watching Cisco's entry into the server market. "If the Cisco relationship opens up new market opportunities, that's where the upside will be."
... Read moreNew "Nehalem" servers will anchor Intel's renewed push into cloud computing, as the chipmaker focuses on mega data centers with hundreds of thousands of servers.
Intel's cloud-computing efforts this year will be centered on a new server that uses upcoming Nehalem technology, Intel said Tuesday in a teleconference on its cloud-computing strategy. Nehalem is Intel's new chip architecture currently used only in its Core i7 desktop processors.
Mega data centers potentially mean mega-growth. The world's largest chipmaker sees between 20 percent and 25 percent of server shipments going to mega data centers by 2012. Today mega data centers represent about 10 percent of the server market, according to Intel.
And what is cloud computing to Intel? A cloud architecture aimed at mega data centers with hundreds of thousands of servers that "can be balanced automatically. Automatically resized and scaled," according to Jason Waxman, general manager of high-density computing at Intel's Server Platforms Group. "Your service is stateless: it's not the same server every time. At any point in time I'm not necessarily accessing the same server."
Intel's goal is to optimize this massive mesh of server hardware. "Optimization is key. When you're talking about hundreds of thousands of servers, every server, every watt, every network connection represents cost," he said.
Waxman said Intel will use its upcoming Nehalem silicon to spearhead its renewed push into mega data centers. "We've designed a server for a Nehalem-based board that's optimized for our cloud-computing infrastructure," said Waxman. The "Willowbrook" motherboard will be launched later this quarter, according to Waxman.
Willowbrook is designed with "very efficient voltage regulation," he said, and "we've optimized the layout of the boards" so air can flow more efficiently across the board. Waxman added that "idle power" has been reduced--a crucial metric for mega data centers. "We've been able to take out power. At idle, a standard Nehalem platform consumes 110 to 115 watts, we've been able to get it down to the sub-85 watt range," he said.
Overall, optimization and power savings boils down to cost. For a large cloud service provider, 50 percent of the total cost is the compute infrastructure--servers and storage--and 25 percent is delivering the power and cooling, he said. "75 percent of the (total cost of ownership) is computer, power, and cooling. And this is what Intel is focused on. Optimize the servers and get every watt we can out the servers."
Waxman said repeatedly that Intel is not going to be a service provider but wants to enable customers to take advantage of Intel cloud-computing technology. "We're not trying to become a service provider but we bring all this core technology and expertise together. The capability to look at a cloud and optimize it," he said.
He cited Salesforce.com, IBM, and Microsoft as service providers and added that "it's sort of a wild west frontier" as many of the more comprehensive cloud-computing service products from major companies are not in production yet.
Other technologies that Intel will roll out with Nehalem server chips include Virtual Machine Device Queues (VMDQ) that allow traffic to be queued up and aim to resolve an outstanding problem in which one virtual machine can hog all the bandwidth. Waxman also discussed the "I/O hub" technology that Intel is implementing with Nehalem. "It has a tremendous number of PCI Express Gen 2 lanes. Gen 2 for speed and more lanes--that's kind of our strategy," he said. The Peripheral Component Interconnect or PCI bus is a data path to a computer's peripheral devices such as a network card or graphics card.
Waxman also discussed a Node manager. "Within a data center, I'm trying to figure out how to use as many servers as I possibly can and one of the challenges of optimizing a cloud is how do you make sure you don't overload a server and create a server hot spot," he said. The Node manager will reside in the motherboard BIOS, he said.
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