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Todd Christ
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Three short years ago, this would have taken 32 Xeon 5100 (Woodcrest) servers, accounting for 64U of rack space... this pic is from the upcoming Xeon MP (Beckton) platform with Nehalem-EX processors that many of you have seen at IDF 2009.  This server only takes 3U of rack space... less than 5% of the space of what it could replace.

 

Sometimes you see a screenshot and it just makes your jaw drop...

64threadgoodness.jpg

 

Just to give a comparison of CPU density... here's a diagram showing the comparison of 3 year old technology compared to the upcoming Nehalem-EX.  If each of those 32 old servers burns 400W of power - that's 12.8 kilowatts - compared to one server, burning less than 1kW.

32-to-1-consolidation.jpg

 

What's even more amazing, is that some design wins are based on a 1U server with the same cpu footprint - that's AWESOME!

What are your thoughts on these upcoming multi-core technology improvements?

Tags: 45nm, hpdc, datacenter_efficiency, roi, xeon, consolidation, mp, beckton, boxboro-ex, tomorrow, nehalem-ex, datacenter, nodemanager


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Oct 15, 2009 7:19 PM Guest Michael Janke  says:

If you consider IBM's X-Series circa 2006, you could have gotten 64 cores in a half of a rack, with a pretty good memory architecture.

 

64 cores in 3U is pretty impresive though.
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Oct 16, 2009 9:35 AM Todd Christ Todd Christ    says in response to Michael Janke:

Michael - good point!  With dual-socket/dual-processor models - you could definitely reduce by 1/2.  You're still looking at 6.4kW vs < 1kW in power for the same CPU thread footprint.
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Oct 19, 2009 4:26 AM Guest haha  says in response to Todd Christ:

Intel should stop messing around with the advertising and just release the damn processor already.  I know you guys already have the CPU produced, probably waiting on the software infrastructure to catch up with hardware features.  Why not release it now? All the software features can be released later.

 

You guys just don't get it.  Right now the Xeon 5500 is better than even the quad socket 7400 Xeons.  So you are leaving a big hole in the 4S and above market.  People who really need the memory footprint have no choice but to go with 8 Socket AMD Opterons, even though the Xeon 5500 is a lot cheaper and comparable to 4 Socket Shanghai and Dunningtons.

 

Some people just can't wait to put 512GB-1TB of ram in their DB servers you know. So stop messing around.  You guys said you would start volume production in Q4 2009.  Surprise me, and release it before Christmas?
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Nov 11, 2009 6:27 AM Guest Jürgen  says:

Is that really an 8 CPU machine with the Octocore Nehalem (EX/Beckton)? Because I see only 64 threads. I expected to see 128 threads, thanks to Hyperthreading :-)

Apart from that... When are the CPUs coming? It's taking too long! No one wants to buy 4- or 8-CPU-Servers with Intel anymore, you guys are losing that business to AMD (like HP DL785-G6)!!!
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Nov 16, 2009 1:19 PM Todd Christ Todd Christ    says in response to Jürgen:

Hi Jürgen - this is a 3U 4-socket server - so that's why you're seeing 64 threads

 

That's 8 CPU's per socket with HyperThreading enabled.  To date, that's the highest CPU per socket density in an x86 platform.
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Nov 17, 2009 12:37 PM Guest Tom Groenfeldt  says:

besides algorithmic trading, are there other business applications that make a lot of sense for a 32-core machine where all the operations can be done without going across a network between servers?
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