Derrick
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Nehalem Xeons officially reign alongside their desktop Core i7 counterparts.
We’ve tested numerous systems since the release of the Core i7 architecture, more popularly known as Nehalem, with the Intel setup sweeping away all challengers seemingly with ease.
Until now.
The new contender sits brooding on my workbench, powered down, but its intelligent cooling system nevertheless generates as much noise as my desktop system nearby. When it starts up, believe me, you’ll know. It sounds just like a Boeing 747 engine spooling up for takeoff, as heard from outside on the wing. It’s painfully loud, and takes a good 15 seconds after shutting down for the whistling of slowing fans to die away.
Mighty impressive to be honest. All right, the pseudo suspense building ends here. You’ve looked at the pictures and you know what we’re toying with here; and yes, it is another bloody industryleading Intel product. However, the new Xeon 5500 series CPUs are more than just another step up in frequencies and memory bandwidth. There’s a bit more you need to know, and just why it means anything to your daily duties.
This, then, is the Nehalem enterprise product, and like the desktop processors that precede them, they are indomitable computational monsters and nothing less. These are Nehalems designed for multiprocessor operations after all, destined to power the highest-end workstations and the vast majority of the servers in the world for the next few years. In fact, our demo is a rack server – the “Urbanna” concept to codenamejunkies.
It’s got a high-efficiency 750W PSU, with an additional slot for redundant power, a pair of Xeon 5550 2.67GHz processors between their newly-integrated memory controllers, sharing an insubstantial 6GB of 1,000MHz DDR3 RAM. And it must be just about the highest-density form of raw computational capability available today. If you run a data centre, we bet you know what we’re about to get into. The pure power of this platform is not really something that any conventional benchmark will show you. Using the Windows Server 2008 installation that the machine booted into, we installed our regular SACM test suites, and ran the tests to get performance results only slightly improved over Core i7 965 systems. They just aren’t optimised to capitalise on the 16 cores available to process their workload threads. Or we could go into the tried-and-trusted server benches, which, incidentally, the new Xeon has already claimed 30 world records for.
That’s enough said about that though, surely? It owns, stomps up and down on its closest competitor, its own previous generation, just like its desktop sibling. Some of this performance advantage comes from the new RAM subsystem. The doubling of memory controllers (now integrated into each CPU, remember, and not chained to the board itself) coupled with the death of the limitations of the FSB in favour of QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) make for an immediate effective doubling of throughput. Just like that. RAM-hungry apps can gulp up vast tracts of open RAM with lightning haste.
Hang about, though. Yes, that’s right… I said sixteen cores. Two quad-core processors, with HyperThreading making for a total of 16 virtual cores. From two physical slots. Add to this equation the whole new platform that launched in conjunction with these new CPUs. In the case of our Urbanna sample, a Tylersburg 36D chipset (no, not a bust measurement), which includes, amongst several other new features, some brand-new virtualisation technologies dubbed VT-c (connectivity) and VT-d (Direct I/O), and an integrated 10GbE Ethernet port. Have we mentioned the 96GB of available RAM capacity?
This strong platform-led drive into the virtualised server space has several ramifications. Most obviously, it provides the means by which data centres can support the 15 billion Internet connected devices Intel predicts will be roaming our planet in the relatively near future, without taking up a substantial proportion of the space available in which to roam with giant server farms, supported by similarly bulky heavyduty climate control systems, and the bulkiest of it all, the generating capacity for the amount of electricity such operations would consume. When
Intel says that this CPU is the most ‘game changing’ the company has launched since it began its domination of the volume server market with the introduction of the Pentium Pro, this is what it’s talking about.
The new architecture consumes less power per clock cycle thanks to its efficiency; is capable of dynamically scaling its own power requirements to match existing workloads and thermal operating environments; is able to achieve a lower idle consumption via the ability to idle individual cores in the classic on-demand computing model, and can even boost the clock speeds of individual cores temporarily to get through demanding workloads and back to ‘lean’ power status as quickly as possible!
So, as a server-consolidation exercise, even if you had the all-butlatest Xeon 5400 series running your existing data centre, you could replace every two of them with one of these and you’d be able to perform the same workload consuming half the space and electricity, and generating half the heat of the old machines. For even older dual-core Xeons, the ratio is more like one of these babies for every nine of the old ones installed... And that’s just in terms of pure clock for clock.
The platform optimisations in this new breed of server will yield even better performance results as you explore virtualisation to maximise hardware utilisation, and class-leading results for multi-system HPC and monolithic database applications. As the basics for the Cloud we’re rapidly building, all of the intelligent, load-based balancing of power and server performance built into the Xeon 5500 and its supporting platform will be crucial.
So, if you’ve got a data centre in the pipeline and are struggling with achieving the computational densities you need with your existing hardware specs, or are finding the challenges of cooling and powering the whole lot a bit excessively trying, or even simply wishing to ensure that the investment you make now will be able to scale into a platform for nextgen
Cloud data centre services, well, you need look no further really. And next up comes the 7700 series, essentially the same chip but in quad-socket flavour... Nehalem Xeons officially reign alongside their desktop Core i7 counterparts. In fact, beyond just leading in market share, this new generation is once again leading the technology sector as a whole to its next phases of evolution.
We’ve tested numerous systems since the release of the Core i7 architecture, more popularly known as Nehalem, with the Intel setup sweeping away all challengers seemingly with ease.
Until now.
The new contender sits brooding on my workbench, powered down, but its intelligent cooling system nevertheless generates as much noise as my desktop system nearby. When it starts up, believe me, you’ll know. It sounds just like a Boeing 747 engine spooling up for takeoff, as heard from outside on the wing. It’s painfully loud, and takes a good 15 seconds after shutting down for the whistling of slowing fans to die away.
Mighty impressive to be honest. All right, the pseudo suspense building ends here. You’ve looked at the pictures and you know what we’re toying with here; and yes, it is another bloody industryleading Intel product. However, the new Xeon 5500 series CPUs are more than just another step up in frequencies and memory bandwidth. There’s a bit more you need to know, and just why it means anything to your daily duties.
This, then, is the Nehalem enterprise product, and like the desktop processors that precede them, they are indomitable computational monsters and nothing less. These are Nehalems designed for multiprocessor operations after all, destined to power the highest-end workstations and the vast majority of the servers in the world for the next few years. In fact, our demo is a rack server – the “Urbanna” concept to codenamejunkies.
It’s got a high-efficiency 750W PSU, with an additional slot for redundant power, a pair of Xeon 5550 2.67GHz processors between their newly-integrated memory controllers, sharing an insubstantial 6GB of 1,000MHz DDR3 RAM. And it must be just about the highest-density form of raw computational capability available today. If you run a data centre, we bet you know what we’re about to get into. The pure power of this platform is not really something that any conventional benchmark will show you. Using the Windows Server 2008 installation that the machine booted into, we installed our regular SACM test suites, and ran the tests to get performance results only slightly improved over Core i7 965 systems. They just aren’t optimised to capitalise on the 16 cores available to process their workload threads. Or we could go into the tried-and-trusted server benches, which, incidentally, the new Xeon has already claimed 30 world records for.
That’s enough said about that though, surely? It owns, stomps up and down on its closest competitor, its own previous generation, just like its desktop sibling. Some of this performance advantage comes from the new RAM subsystem. The doubling of memory controllers (now integrated into each CPU, remember, and not chained to the board itself) coupled with the death of the limitations of the FSB in favour of QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) make for an immediate effective doubling of throughput. Just like that. RAM-hungry apps can gulp up vast tracts of open RAM with lightning haste.
Hang about, though. Yes, that’s right… I said sixteen cores. Two quad-core processors, with HyperThreading making for a total of 16 virtual cores. From two physical slots. Add to this equation the whole new platform that launched in conjunction with these new CPUs. In the case of our Urbanna sample, a Tylersburg 36D chipset (no, not a bust measurement), which includes, amongst several other new features, some brand-new virtualisation technologies dubbed VT-c (connectivity) and VT-d (Direct I/O), and an integrated 10GbE Ethernet port. Have we mentioned the 96GB of available RAM capacity?
This strong platform-led drive into the virtualised server space has several ramifications. Most obviously, it provides the means by which data centres can support the 15 billion Internet connected devices Intel predicts will be roaming our planet in the relatively near future, without taking up a substantial proportion of the space available in which to roam with giant server farms, supported by similarly bulky heavyduty climate control systems, and the bulkiest of it all, the generating capacity for the amount of electricity such operations would consume. When
Intel says that this CPU is the most ‘game changing’ the company has launched since it began its domination of the volume server market with the introduction of the Pentium Pro, this is what it’s talking about.
The new architecture consumes less power per clock cycle thanks to its efficiency; is capable of dynamically scaling its own power requirements to match existing workloads and thermal operating environments; is able to achieve a lower idle consumption via the ability to idle individual cores in the classic on-demand computing model, and can even boost the clock speeds of individual cores temporarily to get through demanding workloads and back to ‘lean’ power status as quickly as possible!
So, as a server-consolidation exercise, even if you had the all-butlatest Xeon 5400 series running your existing data centre, you could replace every two of them with one of these and you’d be able to perform the same workload consuming half the space and electricity, and generating half the heat of the old machines. For even older dual-core Xeons, the ratio is more like one of these babies for every nine of the old ones installed... And that’s just in terms of pure clock for clock.
The platform optimisations in this new breed of server will yield even better performance results as you explore virtualisation to maximise hardware utilisation, and class-leading results for multi-system HPC and monolithic database applications. As the basics for the Cloud we’re rapidly building, all of the intelligent, load-based balancing of power and server performance built into the Xeon 5500 and its supporting platform will be crucial.
So, if you’ve got a data centre in the pipeline and are struggling with achieving the computational densities you need with your existing hardware specs, or are finding the challenges of cooling and powering the whole lot a bit excessively trying, or even simply wishing to ensure that the investment you make now will be able to scale into a platform for nextgen
Cloud data centre services, well, you need look no further really. And next up comes the 7700 series, essentially the same chip but in quad-socket flavour... Nehalem Xeons officially reign alongside their desktop Core i7 counterparts. In fact, beyond just leading in market share, this new generation is once again leading the technology sector as a whole to its next phases of evolution.