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.

As part of the Sun Microsystems and Intel alliance, the two companies have collaborated to bring open source Threading Building Blocks (TBB) support to the Solaris Operating System (OS) and Sun Studio software toolchain. Check out the SUN Blog for additional information. Click the video below for a short interview with Deepanker Bairagi, Principal Engineer for the Sun Studio.

Software parallelism can unleash the processing power that the newer multi-core architectures provide, including the Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processors. For developers, multithreading offers a software parallelism model, but many existing solutions require a lot of low-level coding. Threading Building Blocks offers a rich approach to expressing parallelism in a C++ program by offering higher-level, task-based parallelism that abstracts platform details and threading mechanism for performance and scalability.

The Solaris OS is able to take advantage of multicore architectures, including the Intel Architecture, with features such as a lightweight processes (LWPs), load-balancing across cores, and processor affinities. Sun Studio software offers a complete integrated toolchain for Solaris and Linux platforms, including parallelizing compilers, performance and thread analysis tools, memory and code debuggers, NetBeans-based Integrated Development Environment, and more.

Combined with Threading Building Blocks, developers for the Solaris platform now have a fully loaded toolbox that simplifies the development of optimized multithreaded applications for multi-core Intel processors. Click here to learn more about Threading Building Blocks and optimizing performance for multi-core processors.

Would like to hear from the community on how you see this impacting the next generation of software development for Solaris running on Intel Architecture.

Technology moves at such a rapid pace - it can often be mind-boggling. Even working directly with the product teams at Intel, I sometimes have difficulty keeping pace. The good news is that there is a tremendous opportunity today to be captured thanks to this rapid innovation, as well as a steady stream of advanced technology that IT can use to better support business and gain a competitive advantage. Recently I was interviewed by Tim Phillips from the Register about the current 45nm Quad-Core Intel Xeon products and the next generation Intel platforms based on the Nehalem processor.

A few years back, Intel fundamentally changed the way we design and develop our underlying micro-processor technology. We streamlined our innovation and accelerated it's pace. Internally, we call this new model Tick-Tock. I like to call it shrink and innovate.

A "Tick" is a manufacturing process shrink that delivers smaller silicon with higher speeds, more transistors and lower power consumption (example: moving from 65nm to 45nm process technology). The 45nm quad-core xeon processors (available since Nov '07) utilize unique materials (a high-k, dielectric) that are delivering industry leading performance / watt as measured by the industry's first and only standard benchmark, SPECPower

A "Tock" represents a more extensive architectural innovation (ex. Intel Core Microarchitecture) introducing new micro-architecture features and functionality fully utilizing the higher transistor count set up by the shrink. For Intel Xeon-based servers, the next "tock" is Nehalem. In addition to the new micro-architecture based on 45nm, a system re-design will incorporate next generation memory, I/O and virtualization technology for high performance, high bandwidth solutions compatible with today's leading software solutions

Today, Intel launched 50W low power versions of the 45nm Quad-Core Xeon processors (the L5400 series).
The 2 new SKUs are listed below:

Quad-Core Xeon L5420 2.50 GHz, 12MB L2, 1333MHz
Quad-Core Xeon L5410 2.33 GHz, 12MB L2, 1333MHz

These products offer IT and business users 2 primary benefits:

• 45nm 50W quad-core brings 25% improved performance over previous generation 65nm 50W quad-core processors
• They also run 30W cooler than mainstream 80W quad-core processors delivering the same performance at the same frequency.

We have seen strong interest for these 50W quad-core products and I'd like to hear from you on where you would use low power quad-core and why?

During my blog post last week titled "processors-cpus-cores-arent-they-all-the-same", I got a request to talk more about server terminology, going beyond the CPU. So here we go.

The processor does all your computational calculations. The chipset is attached to the processor and manages information and data flow from the processor to the other system components like memory and other I/O (input / output) devices. If the processor is the "brain", then the chipset is the "heart". Memory and I/O devices are like "arms" and "legs" - you need them all working together. The term chipset, memory controller, and memory controller hub (MCH) are often used interchangeably

At Intel, we refer to the platform as the combination of all of these devices that comprise a server. From a hardware perspective, I see the following terms used interchangeably: platform, solution, system, server, workstation, and there are probably others I'm missing. However, I have also seen platform refer to the software stack, as well as the complete hardware and software solution together.

Another term that you may also here is form factor. Form factor refers to the size and shape of the final system you would buy from a manufacturer. The most common server form factors are rack mount, pedestal, towers and blades.

Today's workstation with (2) Intel® Xeon® 5400 Series processors transforms a workstation from a simple design terminal into a powerful engineering tool that helps users potentially compress the time between an idea and a product. At Intel we call that "working differently". In the manufacturing vertical market it may also be called:

• digital prototyping,
• analysis driven design or
• simulation based product design.

Digital prototyping processes may also require that you also rethink your workstation deployment strategy; moving from single processor workstations, to two (2) Intel Xeon 5400 processor based workstations with 8 computational cores and up to 100 peak gigaflops of floating point performance. This compute capacity coupled with the robust visualization environment enabled by two (2) PCI Gen 2 graphics adapters changes would be workstations into workstation supercomputers and enables engineers and designers to concurrently perform traditional CAD design as well moderate size analysis (e.g. over 5M degrees of freedom finite element modeling jobs or up to 10M cell fluid dynamic simulations).

This combination (CAD and Analysis) can help organization optimize CAD parts or assemblies under a wide range of physical scenarios including mechanical and thermal effects. Net result is workstation supercomputers based on Intel® Xeon® 5400 Series processor can help to bring higher quality or more innovative ideas to markets faster than ever before.

In the second comment around the right time for datacenter refresh, I'd like to look at Costs. Power is covered in the comment from Chris and I covered some comments on Space already in the discussion forum. So what it really boils down to is cost of running your existing datacenter versus the costs of throwing the servers out and replacing them. It is clear also from the other comments, that it doesn't make sense to throw out servers which are utilized in average 15% and have them replaced by new servers, which are 5 times faster and utilize the servers 3%... Great achievement hu?... Server Refresh makes therefore most sense to do only when consolidating the environment. How do I consolidate the environment? By using virtualization. See Helmuts blog and the whole theme next week on that topic.

Therefore let's look at the real cost factors, when refreshing the servers:

• Cost of new hardware: That is obviously a significant capital expenditure and starting at about 2000$ for a reasonable DP server. But the trick is also that a lot of server companies offer financing models which make this an operational expenditure. But key is also to understand, that by consolidating your servers at the same time the depreciation costs of the servers may actually decrease, as you have less hardware to depreciate!
• Maintenance costs: Again, reducing the number of servers running given applications, and at the same time unifying the environment helps significantly to reduce the maintenance costs. This can be a significant step in unifying on a given OS or hardware platform.
• Power consumption: Similar to utilization, it doesn't make sense to just look at the power consumption by server, but at the consumption by performance and therefore I can save about 38% in power bills, on a given workload vs. the previous generation hardware and about a 10^th^ of the power of hardware which is 2-3years old. Again, obviously only, if I do this in combination of consolidating the servers. Trick often is, that those costs are often not taken into consideration, as those are not billed to the IT department but to the facilities group. So it becomes an executive decision to ensure they are looked at!.
• Switching costs. Obviously very hard to measure, as this depends on the environment of the customer. And I talked to the customer who said: "No I will never touch this AS400 system, as it just runs and runs and runs." On the other hand I had a customer who replaced just those AS400 systems and saw huge synergistic effects, because he put the application on a standard based architecture and was able to finally integrate it in the other production system and therefore have one reporting and analytics tool.

As this is the first time posting here, here is a quick intro, I started out as a hardware designer for a UK computer company - back in the days when the PC was still a grey tin box with a 4.77MHz 8088 inside. I have been with Intel now for more years than I care to think about, with much of this time working with the OEMs and end-customers focused in the server market across EMEA.

As I trawl thru the press and listen to the industry analysts one topic that everyone is discussing is 'data centre efficiency' ( even elsewhere on this forum Intel IT Data Center Efficiency Initiative - Going Green, Data Center Efficiency ) but what's not real clear is what defines an efficient data centre - is it the efficiency of the servers, the cooling subsystems, the workload that can be handled in a given time or the operational processes that are in place to run the data centre ? And once you have decided what is considered 'efficient' how do you measure or quantify this efficiency.

Currently there are several approaches being considered by the industry to measure data centre efficiency, and I thought it would be worth spending some time looking at three elements that can affect DC efficiency - power, utilisation and process. Given the complexity of the topic I plan to take this in bite sized chunks ( rather than write a mass of text and lose the thread ). So, in this blog I will cover power and will come back to the topic in a subsequent posting to look to the other elements. If you think there are elements to DC efficiency that I am missing please feel free to chip in and provide your insights.

Power Efficiency - Measuring the ratio between the facilities load - cooling, power conversion etc vs. the IT load - compute/storage/infrastructure. Typically this approach focus's on the ratio of electrical power consumption of the various elements within the data centre. With the current focus on the 'environmental & green' aspects of data centres this seems to be the area where most of the attention on Data centre efficiency is focused.

If you look at the average Data Centre today its not just the compute infrastructure that consumes the Watts, power gets consumed by the cooling systems and air conditioners, voltage conversion & battery storage, lighting etc. All this contributes to the 'facilities load' - for many IT managers this does not hit their IT budget and they may not even see the power bill from the utility company so have no idea how much power is consumed by these key elements of their data centre. Current estimates indicate that upwards of 50% of the power that comes into the average data centre gets 'lost ' in the facilities load, more details here & here

There are several groups looking to quantify energy efficiency The Green Grid is working on metric called PUE ( Power Usage Effectiveness ) to measure the ratio of power consumed by the facilities load vs. the power available to the IT equipment in the data center - details in their white papers here. Also the Uptime Institute are doing something similar and various government institutions are getting interested as well and there's an extensive US govt white paper ( if you have a few hours spare to ingest its 150 pages) . In addition the European Union is working on a Data Centre Code of Conduct

The server OEMs are also working on a benchmark for measuring perf/watt ( http://www.spec.org/specpower/ ), these are great for measuring how good a server is on a test workload and how many transactions it can deliver for a given power input. With the increased focus on energy efficient performance this metric will become more and more important to the specifiers and purchasers of servers. With Intel's latest generation 45nm quad core Xeon processors we continue to drive up the performance a processor can achieve for a given Watt input, the challenge for the rest of the industry now is to lower the overall power consumption of the other elements within the server and to increase the throughput of the storage and I/O subsystems to complement the increase processor performance. But at the end of the day does a good perf/watt for a server indicate that a data centre is efficient ?

What's missing from this approach is that there is often no consideration made as to the utilisation of the servers within the data centre consequently it might be possible to achieve 'good' power efficiency numbers but have low server utilisation and hence not extracting the most workload out of the data centre. Here in EMEA we have initiated a Data Centre Efficiency Award to try and start to get a handle how best to identify DCs that are running best practices and delivering of power and utilisation efficiency.

I guess the question at the end of the day is do you consider that your Data Centre is efficient and how are you quantifying this efficiency ?