New Xeon 7500 Treads On Itanium’s Toes

Dell’s recently-launched cloud-optimised servers, including Dell’s first 4-socket Intel-based blade, are based on the new Xeons, and can offer a massive saving on power usage, Dell’s EMEA marketing manager Hugh Jenkins told the London event: “The performance increases are just staggering.” As well as Intel,  Dell supported AMD’s 12-core Opteron launch earlier this week as well, but Jenkins told the Intel event: “”Nehalem makes up the bulk of what we do – the AMD announcement is for a subset of our customers.”

IBM’s new servers rely heavily on the Xeon 7500, said Tikiri Wanduragala, senior server consultant at IBM, who stressed the company’s long relationship with Intel on the processor family: “We’ve been developing this since 2001, and we have invested $800 million in this chipset.”

Asked whether IBM’s support of increasingly powerful Intel Xeons spelt death for IBM’s power chip, Wanduragala said: “People said the mainframe is dead but it isn’t – and nor is Power.” IBM launched its Power7 processors in Februrary, claiming a massive performance increase, and the company would “not hold back” in future, Wanduragala promised, as the system is aimed for a “fundamentally different” environment.

The product details

The Nehalem EX series comprises 11 new Xeon server and storage array processors. Pricing will range from a high of $3,692 (£2434) for the eight-core, 2.26GHz Xeon X7560 designed for expandable systems of up to eight sockets and beyond to $744 (£490) for the quad-core, 1.73GHz Xeon XE6510, which is aimed specifically at dual-processor systems.

Intel also showed some mid-range-type Xeon 7500s with four, six and eight cores. Some of them come with Intel’s proprietary Turbo Boost and some without; all of them are much cooler-running and energy efficient,  fitting into Intel’s standard thermal envelope of 95 to 130 watts for multi-socket processors.

Clay Ryder, principal analyst with Sageza Group,  told eWEEK that the increased RAM in these new chips is probably more important than improved clock speeds for most enterprises. “Most companies are running into an issue now, that when they go to virtualise their servers to put more people on one machine, they are running out of compute horsepower,” Ryder said. “One of the easy ways to address this is to use a system with more RAM on it, so they can put more virtual images on it, and support more and more people.

“The new Xeons have more memory bandwidth and can ultimately support more RAM on the server, which means more virtual servers, more users on a single machine.”

Analysts agreed that the new processor would move Xeons into a role where Itaniums had stood before: “They’ve looked at the competition and had positioned Itanium against the opportunity, but now they’re taking their mainstream technology and putting it up there,” said Enderle. “This really takes their volume, high-value part and moves it up there where their RISC competitor was,” said Enderle adding that it will take a while for these powerful new chips to work their way into maintream use in the data centre.

“Movement in this space is measured in decades,” Enderle said. “These large HPC machines tend to migrate very slowly. Remember, the mainframe was ‘killed off’ in the 1980s, but it’s doing just fine three decades later.”

Other hardware and software vendors at the US event included EMC, Oracle Sun, NEC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, VMware, Cray and SGI.

US reporting by Chris Preimesberger