Intel talking about the 16-thread RISC killer
by Johan De Gelas on May 27, 2009 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- IT Computing general
Take two Nehalem dies, turn them 90 degrees, add a lot of system interface logic and 8 MB extra of L3-cache and you get - very oversimplified - the impressive Nehalem EX, alias "Beckton". The new Xeon MP is an impressive monster, just like it's predecessor Dunnington. Dunnington consisted of 1.9 Billion transistors, the Xeon MP based on the "Nehalem" architecture will feature up to 2.3 Billion transistors.
Those 2.3 Bilion transistors are needed for
- Up to eight cores, 16 threads thanks to SMT
- Up to 24MB of shared L3 cache
- four QuickPath links
- four memory channels which support for up to 16 memory modules per socket
Intel calls the chips to drive the DDR-3 modules "Scalable Memory Buffer" chips, which means that Intel figured out that it is best to move the power gobbling AMB chip from the FBDIMMs to the systemboard. As you need only one chip to drive several registered DDR-3 modules, it consumes a lot less power than placing an AMB chip on each DIMM.
In the second of half of this year, Intel will have a IBM Power 6 killer and a server platform to match. The irony is that when it comes to "Intel Scalable Memory Buffers", IBM has the right to say "what to took you so long to figure out that FB-DIMMs were a pretty bad idea?" Back in 2005, IBM's X3 chipset already featured a solution that allowed large memory capacities with lower latency and much lower power consumption than FBDIMMs.
It will be interesting to see what IBM's respons to the Nehalem EX will be, as Intel's first octal core is going to enter the last market where RISC CPUs still hold their ground: 8 sockets and more.There have been previous attempts, but this time it is for real:more than 15 8+ socket designs are being readied. More irony: IBM will probably design the servers with the highest socket counts which really give the Power servers a run for their money...
As Intel gave its octal core CPU RAS features (MCA) that once belonged to the RISC and Itanium families only, it seems that the last stronghold of the non-x86 servers is going to fall..."mainframe slowly" but steadily. Only the Ultrasparc T2 with its radically different architecture may survive this assault.
The Machine Check Architecture is of course ultra important for the future Xeon MP systems. Even a quad socket system will contain 32 cores and probably up to 512 GB of RAM. That kind of machine simply cries out for large databases and virtualization consolidation. In the latter case, MCA should allow hypervisors such as ESX to overcome critical errors in one of the VMs, instead of shutting down tens of VMs.
In a different note, Intel claims that by August 2009 50% of it's DP server processors sold will be "Nehalem" based. So even though AMD is executing very well and introducing the hex-core "Istanbul" soon, it is not a minute too soon as the Opterons are under heavy attack.
Update: Anand also talked about Nehalem EX in his lab update here.
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AndrewMarshal - Wednesday, January 27, 2010 - link
Hi:I really am amazed to know about the progress on Intel and new inventions they are coming up with. Computer Systems are much secured today and the most of the credit goes to Intel products.
People will agree with me as well definitely.
joe jensen - Wednesday, June 3, 2009 - link
Have you heard of this company inphi ? they had press release about increasing server memory capacity ?manu122 - Friday, August 14, 2009 - link
Micron mentions them in this press release.http://www.micron.com/about/news/pressrelease.aspx...">http://www.micron.com/about/news/pressrelease.aspx...
this looks like a parallel buffer as opposed to AMB serdes allows more DRAM to hide behind the buffer
minijedimaster - Wednesday, May 27, 2009 - link
The grammar in this article is horrendous. Doesn't Anandtech have editors?zsdersw - Thursday, May 28, 2009 - link
I've just put a bottle of baby formula in the microwave.. should be ready for you shortly.JohanAnandtech - Wednesday, May 27, 2009 - link
I fixed a few errors. Let me know if you still find sentences which are somewhat "crippled".lopri - Wednesday, May 27, 2009 - link
Why not just be honest and admit that you're xenophobic? This is a blog post for god's sake.@Johan: Thanks for the news. While this kind of setup is not something I'd ever run, it is still interesting on its technical merit. I'd like to see the actual latency numbers when these come out.
The0ne - Thursday, May 28, 2009 - link
No, sometimes the articles are just that bad.zsdersw - Thursday, May 28, 2009 - link
Your bottle of baby formula will be ready soon, too.