As Intel’s server group Intel Developer Forum (IDF) showcase manager, I am always interested in the responses of IDF attendees to our demo showcase.
Yesterday (Day 2 IDF), after lunch, I went to the Advanced Technology Zone (ATZ) to observe the showcase floor. The ATZ is located in the public hallway in the venue. It contains the demos with latest Intel technologies. This year, we have 2 Nehalem-EX 4-socket server demo’ing in ATZ.
As soon as I walked in ATZ, I saw 2 Asian attendees standing in the corner discussing one of our Nehalem 4 socket demo. As an Asian myself, I walked up to them to say Hello. They were reporters from the Vietnam TV. The Vietnam TV is a national TV, which has an education channel discussing topics including technology and innovation. According to the reporters, this channel broadcasts programs 24 hours per day. The reporters started covering IDF new Intel technologies since 2008 Spring IDF in Shanghai.
The demos they were interested were the Nehalem 4-socket demos. They wanted to see this 8-core and 2.3 billion transistors platform and the applications that leverage this 32-core machine. This is an amazing new Intel platform targeted to be released in early 2010. OEM can design 2-socket to 8 socket Nahelem-EX platform gluelessly, and higher configuration with their own node controllers. Currently, we are expecting 15 8-socket and above configuration systems from 8 OEMs to come to the market at launch.
The 4-socket system supports up to 1 Terabyte main memory. With Intel® HyperThreading technology, it can possess up to 64 logical CPUs. It also contains many reliability features such as Machine Check Architecture (MCA) to recover memory errors without OS blue screen/crash. These features address the need of mission-critical business continuity and performance requirement.
One of the mission-critical environment is the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) trading solution provided by NYSE Technologies. This environment is showcased in this year IDF: With Nehalem-EX scalability, NYSE Technologies demonstrates trading-in-a-box capability. This new trading solution consolidates multiple tiers of servers into a single Nehalem-EX 4-socket system, allowing ultra-low latency that is highly desirable in stock market trading. NO NETWORK HOPS; NO I/O INTERRUPTS; NO WASTED CLOCK CYCLES.
These 2 Vietnam TV reporters conducted the interviews and videocapturing on the 2 Nehalem-EX demos for over 30 minutes. Judging from their engaging questions and their eye-openning facial expression (usually Asian is very conservative in their public expression), it seemed they realized that they were witnessing the history of computing openning a new chapter with Nahelem-EX platform. This type of excitement brings the joy to me as a program manager after almost 5 months hardworking of planning the IDF showcase.
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