AMD launched its first six-core processor, which will compete against Intel's "Dunnington" chip.
The Cray XT5m supercomputer will use the Istanbul chip
(Credit: Cray)The "Istanbul" Opteron processor is for high-end server computers that use two, four, and eight processors or "sockets." Intel has been shipping a six-core processor for this market since September of last year and will bring out a processor based on its new Nehalem architecture for this segment later this year.
Among other new features, AMD is touting an Istanbul technology called HT Assist. The previous way of retrieving data from the processor's memory was "like checking every room in your house for your car keys," said Pat Patla, AMD's general manager of the server workstation group, in a phone interview last week. With HT Assist, "You know where your car keys are," he said. "It's much more efficient and takes out a lot of traffic," Patla added.
Patla also said that AMD is ahead of schedule with this chip, in stark contrast with the company's ill-fated quad-core Barcelona processor, which saw repeated delays. "Within almost a 15-month period of time we were able to design the product, tape out the product (final stage before production), verify the product and launch," Patla said about Istanbul.
Systems based on six-core AMD Opteron processors are expected to be available beginning this month from server suppliers including Cray, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems, AMD said Monday.
Istanbul boasts up to 34 percent more performance-per-watt over the previous-generation quad-core processors.
Intel on Tuesday said it will ship a server chip that contains up to eight processing cores later this year, while IBM showed off a high-end server in the works that uses eight such chips, yielding 64 cores.
Intel's Nehalem-EX architecture supports up to eight processors and each processor can integrate up to eight cores.
(Credit: Intel)Intel's Nehalem-EX processor, in production later this year and expected to be shipping in high-end server systems by early 2010, will feature up to eight cores inside a single chip that supports 16 threads, according to Boyd Davis, Intel's general manager of the Server Platforms Marketing Group, speaking at a teleconference on Tuesday.
Using threads, Intel essentially doubles the amount of work that can be done on each processing core.
IBM, which participated in the conference, discussed a server currently under development that uses 64 Nehalem-EX cores (eight processors) and can handle 128 threads, according to Alex Yost, vice president IBM BladeCenter. "We're very excited today to be the first to demonstrate Nehalem-EX," Yost said.
Nehalem-EX will also double the memory capacity with up to 16 memory slots per processor socket, and offer four high-bandwidth "QuickPath" Interconnect links.
Intel also said the currently-shipping Nehalem server chip is making market gains. Intel's currently-available Xeon 5500, the first server processor based on Intel's Nehalem architecture, will be "greater than half of shipments" for Intel's high-volume two-processor (aka, "two-socket") server shipments by August, according to Davis.
"Customer acceptance has been quite strong," Boyd said. "From an introduction at the very end of March to representing the majority of our shipments in the market for two-processor servers by the August time frame," he said.
Intel showed off a prototype server that can accommodate four eight-core Nehalem-EX processors.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Intel's prototype Nehalem-EX server accommodates eight of these memory cards. They'll use relatively conventional DDR3 memory rather than the FB-DIMM technology Intel's current Xeon 7300 systems.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)
Updated at 10:00 a.m. PDT with correction about launch of Nehalem-EX processor.
Intel is expected to announce details of an 8-core processor for the high-end server market next week.
The chip itself will not actually ship in systems until late 2009 or early 2010.
The 8-core "Nehalem-EX" Xeon processor is designed for servers that can use more than two processors (referred to as "sockets" in server argot). Currently, Intel is shipping Nehalem Xeon processors for servers with two sockets.
Nehalem is the same architecture used in Intel's Core i7 desktop processor line.
The Nehalem-EX is expected to become Intel's top-line Xeon processor. Currently, the six-core "Dunnington" processor, based on Intel's older Penryn architecture, is Intel's highest-performance chip for multi-processor servers.
Nehalem-EX packs 2.3 billion transistors and its eight cores are capable of executing 16 threads (or tasks) at the same time. The chip also has "integrated power gates" for lowering power-consumption.
The announcement of details is slated for May 26. Boyd Davis, Intel's general manager of Server Platforms Marketing Group, will host the roll-out event and "discuss how this new server product raises the standard in cost-effective RISC replacement solutions," according to an Intel note about the event.
As Intel officially unveiled its six-core "Dunnington" Xeon 7400 processor Monday, Unisys rolled out servers boasting up to 96 cores--with a catch.
As expected, Intel launched the Dunnington chip for high-end servers, the company's first six-core processor and last of its Penryn-class chips. Penryn will be followed by the Nehalem microarchitecture, due to appear initially as the Core i7 processor in the fourth quarter.
The Xeon 7400 boasts significantly better performance due to its 16MB cache memory and half-dozen cores.
Intel Xeon 7400 is first 6-core processor
(Credit: Brooke Crothers)The Xeon 7400 is also one of the first Intel chips to have a monolithic design. In other words, all six cores will be on one piece of silicon. To date, for any processor having more than two cores, Intel has put two separate pieces of silicon--referred to as die--inside one chip package.
Unisys is in the vanguard of server vendors offering systems using the 7400 series processor. On Monday, the Blue Bell, Pa.-based computer vendor announced the ES7000 Model 7600R Enterprise Server, a 16- socket server providing up to 96 processor cores.
In addition to being better at handling complex database applications, one of the most compelling features of six-core servers is consolidation: collapsing many servers into a few servers. Unisys said it has demonstrated consolidation of 64 SQL Server databases into a single four-socket, Xeon 7400 processor configuration, with 24 total processor cores. In essence, this collapses a conventional "commodity server farm" of 64 single-socket, dual-core Xeon processor servers into a single server configuration, Unisys said.
There's an odd catch, however, that will affect the highest of high-end configurations. "Because Microsoft Windows operating system support is limited to a 64-core environment, within a single OS instance, we'll support up to 64 cores," said Colin Lacey, a Unisys marketing vice president.
"You'd actually have 96 cores physically within the system. But then you would disable two cores in each socket. So you'd actually be running these sockets at four active cores each (out of six)," Lacey said.
Lacey said this condition is necessary to deliver the highest performance in a Xeon 7400-based server running Windows, though he expects to rectify the 64-processor limitation in the future. He added that he wouldn't consider 64 cores to be a limitation in the "real world" for most customers, who would in most cases opt for servers with a smaller number of cores.
Linux does not have this limitation, Lacey said.
Advanced Micro Devices pre-emptively chimed in on the Xeon 7400 series last week. "Intel has taken the old front-side bus architecture and added 6 cores to it," according to an AMD statement. The company's Opteron processors have jettisoned the front-side bus--a data path between the processor and the memory controller--in favor of putting the memory controller on the same piece of silicon as the processor to speed performance. Intel has done this with its upcoming Nehalem architecture too.
Prices for the ES7000 Model 7600R range from $26,430 to $135,000.
Software vendors are also supporting the Xeon 7400 based platforms, including Citrix, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, SAP, and VMware, Intel said.
Pricing for the Xeon 7000 Sequence processor in quantities of 1,000 ranges from $856 to $2,729.
Other server vendors announcing servers include Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell.
Intel is expected to announce the "Dunnington" processor later this month, the first six-core processor and last of its Penryn-class chips.
Intel on September 15 is expected to roll out the Intel Xeon 7400 series Dunnington processor targeted at the server market, the final member of the "Penryn" family of processors, according to sources at server vendors. Penryn will be followed by the Nehalem microarchitecture, due to appear initially as the Core i7 processor in the fourth quarter.
Server vendors announcing products will include Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell, according to Intel senior vice presiden Pat Gelsinger, speaking at the Intel Developer Forum last month. Other server makers such as IBM and Unisys are also expected to have systems.
The Xeon 7400 boasts significantly better performance due to its large 16MB cache memory and half a dozen cores.
Intel "Dunnington" Xeon 7400 is the first 6-core processor
(Credit: Brooke Crothers)Dunnington is also one of the first Intel chips to have a monolithic design (Nehalem will too). In other words, all six cores will be on one piece of silicon. To date, for any processor having more than two cores, Intel has put two separate pieces of silicon--referred to as die--inside of one chip package.
Intel has described the processor as follows: "Dunnington is the first IA (Intel Architecture) processor with six cores, is based on the 45nm high-k process technology, and has large shared caches."
While the marquee processor theme at IDF Shanghai is "milliwatts to petaflops," Intel is also set to offer a vision of universal connectivity.
The main theme for the event, which starts Wednesday, Beijing time, refers to "very, very big to very, very small and low power," according to Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and co-general manager of Intel's digital enterprise group, speaking in a video.
(See: Intel rolls out five new Atom processors.)
"Milliwatts" refers to chips such as Atom, a tiny low-power, low-cost processor destined for ultramobile devices and low-cost desktops typically running either Linux or Windows XP. The first Atom chips will launch in June.
"Petaflops" refers to high-performance computing--what used to be called supercomputing. ("Peta" is quadrillion, or a thousand trillion; "flop" is floating-point operation.) Intel is targeting petaflop supercomputers that would compete with the fastest supercomputer in the world: IBM's Blue Gene/P machines.
Though more technology and product details will certainly emerge in the next two days in Shanghai, the main chip themes are already out there. Gelsinger spelled them out at briefing earlier this month.
The specs for Intel's Dunnington processor
(Credit: Intel)The chip buzzwords are: Tukwila, a new quad-core chip with 2 billion transistors, a whopping 30MB of cache, and a new interconnect technology called QuickPath; Dunnington, a six-core chip for multiprocessor computers that can support four or more processors (in this case, each with six cores); Nehalem, a follow-on to the current "Penryn" processors, it is a new 45-nanometer chip microarchitecture due in the fourth quarter that scales up to eight cores; and Larrabee, a visual-computing architecture that uses many cores ("many" usually means many more than a typical quad-core computer).
In addition to Atom, the processor spotlight will likely fall on Nehalem and Larrabee. Nehalem is a relatively known quantity; Larrabee, a relatively unknown quantity. So interest should focus on the latter.
Nehalem boasts increased parallelism, better branch prediction (to move instructions more quickly through the instruction pipeline), and an on-chip memory controller for increased memory performance--what Intel calls "memory latency reduction." Something, by the way, Advanced Micro Devices already has in its chips.
Larrabee is a graphics processor scheduled for the 2009-2010 time frame. It will include a new vector instruction set to improve the performance of graphics and video applications. Larrabee will be compatible with Intel's popular x86 instruction set, theoretically making life easier for software developers.
On another front, Intel is evangelizing universal connectivity, always a problematic proposition, simply because it invariably promises more (sometimes much more) than it can deliver. Intel puts it this way: "Imagine a day when a single device small enough to fit in your pocket...knows your tendencies and preferences and can adapt and optimize its interfaces to match what you are doing at any point any time...Imagine a day when this device...can dynamically become a hybrid combination of other computing and multimedia devices in close proximity." You get the picture. Intel calls this "Carry Small, Live Large."
On a slightly more practical level, the Cliffside technology is being demonstrated from the Mobile Products Group; it enables a single Wi-Fi adapter to function like two independent Wi-Fi adapters. The hope is that this technology could sync your MP3 and video files without a USB cable, directly and wirelessly connecting your notebook to your TV to view HD movies. More here.
There is also a demonstration of wireless device discovery and setup. This demonstration shows how to detect and connect to nearby wireless displays, using the familiar FnF7 (Function F7 key combination).
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