I wrote a while back about how the Xeon 7400(Dunnington) processor series compared to RISC. Since then I have shared information through other blog posts and sharing content about how Xeon 7400 and Xeon 5500 will compare to both SPARC and POWER.

Xeon 7400 and Xeon 5500 are the current products shipping into the marketplace today. I.M.H.O they offer a pretty compelling alternative from both a performance and TCO perspective Vs SPARC and POWER. But I will not try and repeat all the reasons here

What I wanted to share with you was some thoughts about what the next product to succeed Xeon 7400 will bring to the RISC party. Nehalem-EX is the code-name for our next generation of product designed to serve workloads currently serviced by Xeon 7400 today (i.e. Database, ERP,  BI etc). EX btw is what we all would traditionally call MP or multi processor servers

Don't stop reading now, here is why I'm EXCITED about what Nehalem-EX will bring to the RISC party.

My excitement is actually based on real customer discussions about what Nehalem-EX will do for them and why it delivers some new stuff (my code for features and benefits) which they see as a pre-requisite to make the move from RISC to Xeon. For some customers the TCO and performance of  products have been enough to convince them to move. For some other customers there are still some checkboxes remaining which I believe Nehalem-EX will address

Here is a snapshot of some of the cool new stuff which is actually convincing customers (from some real deals that I have worked)

1. Improved bandwidth. Up to 9 times memory bandwidth of previous generations
2. Introduction of Quickpath Interconnects to the EX systems
3. Add new RAS features previously seen on Itanium products to Xeon products
4. Significant improvement in performance vs previous generations e.g. Database 2.5xe
5. More scalable platforms through 8 OEMs offering >8S. These platforms are key to manage large databases and for large scale consolidation
6. Mainframe class availability in scalable platforms

For more information check out the press briefing from May. See more the details in the presentation

Nehalem-EX goes into production later this year and I am pretty excited about how it will change the game. What do you think?

Ah, the good old days.... It was normal to have a discussion with a friend or coworker member about something like, "We just bought a 1.2 GHz Pentium III server, it runs circles around that 500 MHz system we bought a few years back."  Everyone nods in approval, all rightly assuming that of course bigger is better and frequency directly relates to performance.  Of course now things are more complex with multi-core, multi-threads, differing architectures (Power, SPARC, Xeon, Opteron).  Is a dual-core at Power6 4.7 GHz faster than a Xeon at 3 GHz? Is a 1.4 GHz processor with 8 threads/core better than a 2.8 GHz quad-core with 2 threads per core?  Tough to know off the top of your head these days.  One thing is clear, the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series is in the lead of performance per processor (regardless of the frequency of processors available today). 

In comparing the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series (Nehalem) architecture vs. what's available from IBM, Sun, and AMD today, you see a wide variety of cpu offerings with dramatically differing specs.  However, when you take a look at all these systems with a common number of cores, you can see the differences in per core performance on the industry standard benchmark SPECint_rate_base2006

What a contrast!  Chip designers today have multiple choices to make to eek out the most performance in today's server systems.  What we see today is that the Intel Xeon processor 5500 series balances all of these quite well.  Whereas others have much higher frequencies, it doesn't necessarily translate into more performance, while others have gone with a larger number of threads, but have low performance per thread.  Even processors that have similar specs have performance that is quite different.  Of course this is only one benchmark, however if you look at others you will find similar differences.   

What this means for most IT buyers is it's more difficult to understand how all the whiz-bang features the marketers throw at you and how they translate into value for you.  My advice, really understand what kind of workloads are improtant to you and focus on the performance from industry standard workloads that best represent those.  Remember that bigger numbers on the spec sheet aren't always better when it comes to server performance.  Check your figures!

SPECint_rate_base2006 performance data reference:

Intel® Xeon® processor X5570 based platform details

Fujitsu PRIMERGY* TX300 S5 server platform with two Intel Xeon processors X5570 2.93GHz, 8MB L3 cache, 6.4GT/s QPI, 48 GB memory (6x8 GB PC3-10600R, 2 rank, CL9-9-9, ECC), SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 x86_64 Kernel 2.6.16.60-0.21-smp, Intel C++ Compiler for Linux32 and Linux64 version 11.0 build 20010131. SPECint_rate_base2006 score 240, http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2009q1/cpu2006-20090313-06653.html

AMD Opteron 2393SE based platform details

Supermicro A+ Server 1021M-UR+B, AMD Opteron 2393 SE 3.1 GHz, 6MB L3 cache, 32 GB memory (8x4 GB DDR2-800, CL5, Reg, Dual-rank), SuSE Enterprise Server 10 (x86_64) SP1, Kernel 2.6.16.46-0.12-smp, PGI Server Complete Version 7.2, PathScale Compiler Suite Version 3.2, SPECint_rate_base2006 score 122, http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2009q2/cpu2006-20090406-06931.html

IBM Power6 based platform details

IBM system p570 (4.7 GHz, 8 core), 32MB L3 cache, 64 GB memory (32x2 GB)DDR2 667 MHz, IBM AIX5L V5.3, XL C/C++ Enterprise Edition Version 9.0 for AIX, SPECint_rate_base2006 score 206, http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2007q2/cpu2006-20070518-01103.html

Sun UltraSPARC T2 plus based platform details

Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120, Sun UltraSPARC T2 1.417 GHz, 4MB L2 cache, 64 GB memory (16x4 GB), Solaris 10 8/07 (build s10s_u4wos_12b), Sun Studio 12 (patch build 2007/08/30), SPECint_rate_base2006 score 73.0, http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2007q4/cpu2006-20071009-02247.html

The current economic environment is unprecedented in our lifetime and is having multiple impacts on Enterprise decision making. IT spending is under severe scrutiny with IT budget reductions forecasted throughout most Enterprises in ’09. Even with reduced budgets, IT needs to continue to improve business productivity and competitiveness. So what can you do to manage all these conflicting conditions?

Maybe this type of environment represents an opportunity to make some changes with respect to your IT Policy. Could this be a good time to simplify and standardize your IT environment by looking at a broader range of choices that are now available. These choices may not have existed in the past due to some of your decision criteria not being meet for your hardware or software needs. Hardware and software evolve at a rapid pace, and the capabilities to meet your needs are significantly different today than what was available 5-7 years ago when you made previous decisions.

Equipment nearing the end of depreciation cycles or lease contracts offer another opportunity to look at the cost and performance of your existing architectures Vs other architectures that are available today. In my previous blog I shared some thoughts on performance and pricing of RISC systems Vs x86 based platforms. There are significant savings that can be made be choosing x86 hardware without trading off on your performance needs. Selecting x86 hardware could enable you to execute your IT refresh and replacement strategy in a reduced Capex budget environment. Sometimes it seems that offsetting a purchase may be a prudent thing to do, but at some point you will have to replace these systems to meet business productivity requirements. In the meantime you will have to spend incremental budget paying extra $’s for maintenance and support for systems that you had planned to replace and you may also not meet the demands placed on you to support your business needs. I also read recently that under the proposed US Stimulus package there may be some provisions for accelerating depreciation on new equipment purchases. This could be another factor to consider in terms of which option will cost you most in the long-run.

One other thought I had was the ability to re-allocate $’s within your overall TCO to spend on other aspects of your solution needs. If you could save money on the hardware cost would it free up $’s for you to spend on the overall solution?. For example could you afford to pay the software license costs and support more users for your ERP environment.

Consolidating older generation RISC based platforms to current x86 based platforms could be another way to offset some of the associated costs associated with maintaining and supporting your RISC environment.  I read a paper recently published by Dell where they talked about the performance difference between V440 SPARC Servers and todays R900 systems. They talked about the R900m being 14 times as fast as V440. This led me to conclude that I could consolidate a distributed workload from a number of older V440s and run that workload on one system. This sounds like a pretty good deal to me as I can save some space in my datacenter, save some energy costs, probably get some savings on software license and support costs.

Another factor to consider is the whole issue of payback. In the current environment everyone is being asked to justify the payback on their investment to be 12 months or less. What if I said that you could get a 9 month payback on your investment in a new hardware platform purely on the basis of savings from power & cooling savings and lower OS maintenance costs. Would these types of savings be enough to justify your investment and consolidating multiple legacy RISC servers to a current x86 platform?. Well that type of payback is attainable, and there are other savings like software license costs, administrator and operator costs that are not really included in the calculations.

Ok, so the counterside to my argument is that it is hard to move a workload from RISC to x86. The savings I get from moving will not be offset by the money I spend to move. It is a fair argument, but there are Customers who have done the transition and saved some significant money by doing so. Avis in Europe are one example that comes to mind where they talk about reduce their TCO by 50% moving from RISC to x86 platform

One of the other comments I often hear relates to it being technically hard to move my solution if it is running on UNIX/RISC to x86 offering. I agree you are moving move one architecture to another and there are some challenges to do so, but there are resources out there to help you. Principled Technologies wrote two reports recently that discussed how you could move your Oracle database to Solaris or Linux running on Xeon. Don’t worry, these were not marketing papers, they actually did this migration in a real lab environment and documented the technical ‘how to’.

Ok, so these are some of my thoughts, let me know what you think?.

Have you ever asked yourself that question when you are bombarded with marketing messages from multiple different companies on why choose their products vs. a competitors product?. As a non-Engineer in an engineer centric company, I certainly have thought about this several times and asked myself a very simple question - Why should I choose one architecture type over another offering?

I suppose the best place is to start at the beginning and try and decipher the acronym soup of RISC, x86 etc. I decided to use my ‘old friend’ Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org/ to help with this process. What I found was another alphabet soup that I could have researched for hours, but try and simplify it below. I attach my detailed definition findings at end of this blog.

Simply put, RISC (pronounced risk) is a CPU design to use simplified instructions to execute very fast thus providing higher performance. x86 is a generic term that refers to the instruction set of another CPU architecture. So basically both RISC and x86 are types of instruction sets linked to CPU architecture.

So which one should I choose?.

Call me old fashioned, but as a business guy, it always comes down to 3 basic tenets in terms of making a decision

1) I like choice and the ability to pick and choose between multiple suppliers to get the best deal to meet my needs.(and the ability to change supplier without major obstacles)

2) Performance is really important. The higher performance means that I get my work done quicker which reduces the overall cost / improves time to revenue and ultimately improves the productivity of my business

3) System cost and total cost of ownership are key decision points in today’s era which is vastly different from the ‘dot.com’ boom. It is all about managing the bottom line through good decisions around CAPEX and OPEX spending

I applied my decision criteria and quickly found out that there is not a lot of choice from a hardware and operating system perspective with RISC architecture. In fact it looks quite the opposite of choice which always concerns me, call me pro-choice if you like, but I like the ability to move around suppliers!. On the other hand I found x86 to have lots of choice with many hardware vendors to list and a range of operating systems from windows to Linux and Solaris.

Having choice out of the way, I then moved onto performance for my business and looked at published results from many hardware vendors on different websites like http://www.spec.org. what I found was that Intel based systems had a lot of leading results against architectures like SPARC from SUN or Fujitsu and POWER from IBM.

I then looked at price (and being an ex-Accountant in my past career) nearly jumped for joy when I saw that system prices were low for x86 systems compared to the comparable RISC systems.

This analysis helped me understand it better and helped simplify my decision making.

Here is a short video with a little bit more detail. I would be interested in your thoughts and have you had any similar experiences that you would like to share.