Intel Goes After RISC With Xeon 7500-Series

[Guest]

Intel's x86 architecture has done well in the mid-range of the server market, but it's still not considered the proper solution for mission-critical systems. That'll change with Xeon 7500 (formerly Nehalem-EX), which could very well displace Itanium.


Intel Goes After RISC With Xeon 7500-Series : Read more

 

[surda]

even though i dont read much about server processors but this just sounds super fast, i like how it has alot of error stages checking so that it stays 24/7 without crashing, but do they really need all that speed for servers? i just gotta say hardware technology is moving very fast these days.

nice article btw thank you.

 

[anamaniac]

These chips are absolute beasts! They do run at low frequencies however. (But would you want 130W chips in a 4P/8P box?)
4 memory channels, 16 DIMMs per CPU, damn. I imagine you'd spend more on the 16GB DDR3 DIMMs than you would the processors though.
Also nice to hear that these scale well in 4P/8P boxes.

But I must ask, why are the 7500 chips in 45nm? Is the 32nm process still too immature to make a 2 billion transistor chip with any decent level of success?

Assuming a 8P box, all CPU's clocked to 3.5GHz (~120GFlop per CPU, ~1TFlops total), you could run a few games purely in software mode and still get good performance. Damn.

 

[Guest]

"In the course of one week, two separate events signaled what may be the end of Intel's grand experiment with RISC architecture. Intel released the Xeon 7500-series processor family, containing many features found in the Itanium, a RISC-based design developed in partnership with Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft ended its support of Itanium."

When did Itanium change from being a VLIW architecture to being a RISC architecture?... It was designed to overcome some RISC architecture limitations of the day. XScale was Intel's big RISC mistake...

 

[RazberyBandit]

I think it's just poor wording. Both portions of that sentence refer to the Xeon-7500. Try it this way:

"In the course of one week, two separate events signaled what may be the end of Intel's grand experiment with RISC architecture. Intel released the Xeon 7500-series processor family, a RISC-based design developed in partnership with Hewlett-Packard containing many features found in the Itanium, and Microsoft ended its support of Itanium."

There, all better!

 

[Guest]

How necessary is it to have the error correction circuitry? If it's that important and the normal desktop and server architecture doesn't have it then are we not all accumulating errors in our data and code? With what frequency does this happen in the real world - and is the machine check architecture actually important, or just a bullet point for a sales brochure?

 

[gglawits]

AMD's Magny-Cours is the better value proposition.
Compare the AMD 6128 (8 cores, 2.0 GHz, $266 list price) against the Xeon X7550 (8 cores, 2.0 GHz, $2729 list price) and you'll see what I mean. The XEON cost more than 10 times as much! Sure it's faster, but not 10 times faster. Not even 2 times faster.

 

[cjl]

[citation][nom]gglawits[/nom]AMD's Magny-Cours is the better value proposition.Compare the AMD 6128 (8 cores, 2.0 GHz, $266 list price) against the Xeon X7550 (8 cores, 2.0 GHz, $2729 list price) and you'll see what I mean. The XEON cost more than 10 times as much! Sure it's faster, but not 10 times faster. Not even 2 times faster.[/citation]
You clearly didn't understand a word of this article.

 

[KlamathBFG]

Also consider the applications that can have their life extended with a new scaled up limit and compare that to the cost of re-engineering those applications and suddenly $2729 a processor sounds cheap $27,900 or in some cases $272,900 would still be cheap.

 

[idisarmu]

[citation][nom]gglawits[/nom]AMD's Magny-Cours is the better value proposition.Compare the AMD 6128 (8 cores, 2.0 GHz, $266 list price) against the Xeon X7550 (8 cores, 2.0 GHz, $2729 list price) and you'll see what I mean. The XEON cost more than 10 times as much! Sure it's faster, but not 10 times faster. Not even 2 times faster.[/citation]

You sir, are an idiot. RAM is MUCH more expensive than these CPUs. Even 16gb of desktop DDR3 memory costs about $800. Now these mobos generally have more than 4 dimms per cpu- more like 8, so $1600 for RAM makes a $266 CPU seem really really cheap. Now server memory is always more expensive, so I think it would make perfect sense to spend $2000 more in order to have a system with fewer bottlenecks.

 

[ta152h]

Why comment on the Itanium when you don't know what it is? This doesn't signal the writing on the wall, only 6% of Itanium buyers were using Windows.

It still has reliability features far exceeding the Nehalem-EX, and they are still greatly supported by the largest computer maker in the world, which, by the way, also was the original designer.

It's not going anywhere.

 

[gglawits]

For the two rude Intel fanboys "cjl" and "isisarmu", here's the math:

Two-socket 16 core Opteron system with 32 GByte RAM:
Tyan S8230 ... $460 (source: Froogle)
two Opteron 6128 ... $266 x 2 = $532 (source: AMD)
sixteen 2GByte DDR3 ECC DIMMs ... $60 x 16 = $1000 (source: Froogle)
case, P/S, HD ... $400 (estim.)
Grand total ... $2400 for a 16 core, 32 GByte server ($150 per core)

Two-socket 16 core Intel "Beckton" system with 32 GByte RAM:
motherboard ... $478 (assumed price, not available yet)
two Xeon E6550 ... $2461 x 2 = $4922 (source: Intel)
sixteen 2GByte DDR3 ECC DIMMs ... $60 x 16 = $1000 (source: Froogle)
case, P/S, HD ... $400 (estim.)
Grand total ... $6800 for a 16 core server, more than $400 per core

Again, nobody doubts that the "Beckton" system will be faster.
But, hey, $2400 vs. $6800 is a heck of a price difference.

 

[notty22]

I think its the AMD fanboy who is not paying attention. Its stated clearly in the article AMD themselves don't see M-C as a competitor to this product.

AMD has never positioned M-C as a competitor to the Xeon 7500-series; it sees the Intel Xeon 5600 processor family as its primary competitor.

This does not take a genius to figure out !
There are countless mission critical scenarios where second best in speed/reliability will cost companies money + get people fired(IT guy who chose the 'better deal' . Financial transactions with the NYSE, Amazon.coms inventory, Credit Card companies customer's accounts......

 

[Reynod]

I think the point is that N-EX will target much of the market space previously held at the top ... not the middle ... where Beckton sits, and AMD hopes to win back both the low end (2P) and eat into the middle (4P) with their price / power / efficiency strategy ... 6100.

That's good news for small businesses ... as costs for the low and mid range systems will drop due to competition.

N-EX based systems will nevertheless cost you an arm, leg, and possibly a kidney ... no competition there to dissuade Intel to drop the price.

And why should they? Must have cost a squillion on the R&D to make this puppy pass inspection... many engineers toiling into the wee hours.

Good article ... a tremendous chip too.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

"Itanium servers were usually multi-million dollar beasts that ran multi-petabyte Oracle databases or line-of-business applications that had to always run."

petabyte - how many zeroes after the 1?

 

[goodguy713]

lol i would love to see gaming bench marks on a system like this

 

[Guest]

We are using 6 Dl580 G5 with two socket 6-core 7400x cpu and 63GB RAM on each server in a single ESX4 cluster. Total 384GB of RAM, ll hooked up to 80 Terabytes of FiberChannel 15k DISKs on a EMC Clariion SAN. There are about 200 virtual machines including Exchange 2007, SQL servers, oracle server, and a large number of application servers running on OS ranging from server 2000, 2003 and server 2008. The CPU load are barely over 30% utilization.

Imagine if we have these X7500 CPU they would be just sleeping. LOL

Imagine if I had the X7500 CPU in these

 

[ossie]

Finally intel comes to the 8P party... where AMD was for almost a decade... alone, with no intel in sight - Opteron 8xx(x) anyone?
While 8P systems amount to a tiny fraction of the server/workstation market - mostly 2P and some 4P - evolution is always welcomed.
[citation][nom]notty22[/nom]I think its the AMD fanboy who is not paying attention. Its stated clearly in the article AMD themselves don't see M-C as a competitor to this product. This does not take a genius to figure out ![/citation] ... more wintel fanboy b$. If some THGossip article "states" something, it must be true... right? Wrong.

Even accustomed with the usual THGossip wintel bias and hype, micro$uxx' relevance in the mission-critical market is more than overblown... they're plain irrelevant.
No more Itanic support? Good riddance - only gamer loader diehards would've used the crap from redmond anyway.

[citation][nom]jacp1000[/nom]How necessary is it to have the error correction circuitry? If it's that important and the normal desktop and server architecture doesn't have it then are we not all accumulating errors in our data and code? With what frequency does this happen in the real world - and is the machine check architecture actually important, or just a bullet point for a sales brochure?[/citation]
All critical servers/workstations implement ECC. If not, it would be just a russian roulette game, until data corruption or crashes occur.
It's not about "if" - errors are guaranteed to occur - but about "when" - and how to reliably detect, and correct them, and if uncorrectable ones appear, to take appropriate measures.
Even if the drm infested games loader doesn't support RAS features, it doesn't mean that serious work shouldn't be done, where they are mandatory.

 

[K2N hater]

These processors will never show their true potential while running on cheap 1-2U heatsinks and tiny fans that last 1 year at most.

 

[bentonsl_2010]

"Itanium servers were usually multi-million dollar beasts that ran multi-petabyte Oracle databases or line-of-business applications that had to always run."

petabyte - how many zeroes after the 1?

1 PB = 1,000,000,000,000,000 or 1000 TB's