Intel Pushes Back with Xeon 5100 140
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a piece on Intel's newest chip, the Xeon 5100, which many consider might be the chip that will llow them to stop losing ground to AMD. From the article: 'During the presentation, Intel ran the now-standard comparison test against AMD's highest performing chip, handily beating the system in a speed test. And in a jab at AMD execs, who handed kill-o-watt meters to analysts at the outfit's recent technology day, Intel execs used the same device to measure the new Xeon 5100 system's performance — gauged to be 7 watts better than that of the AMD-based system.'"
Road Map (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not that they had anything that was all that much better than IBM or AMD at the time they were making their pitch to Jobs. It was the fact that their immediate future was being prepped with some impressive technology, both in terms of speed and speed-per-watt, which turned the Steve's head.
They only have 2 of the 3 key components to win (Score:1, Interesting)
Who cares is Intel is a few mips faster?
No. (Score:5, Interesting)
more then 2 cpus (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Oh, sweet irony, forgive them! (Score:3, Interesting)
Keyword: dumping? (Score:3, Interesting)
Since Japan has already hit Intel for anti-competetive moves, can AMD prove illegal dumping?
Re:Still feature limited (Score:5, Interesting)
The Optron's scaling issues beyond 4P is not "worse then expected," because it is entirely expected of the architecture.
The high-end Opteron has 3 HT links. This means it can work with up to 8 sockets "gluelessly," but it really performans much better with 4-socket systems. The architecture for a 4-way Opteron server uses the extra HT link to reduice the number of hops [linuxsoft.cz], so only one case has two hops.
But you can imagine that the 8-way configurations have a much higher average number of hops between processors, PLUS much more data flowing over the same HT links. No, the K8 Opteron is not really designed well for 8-socket systems.
But K8L IS designed for 8-socket systems.
Take a look at a page on this in the K8L preview article on Real World Technologies [realworldtech.com]. Adding a 4th HT link will really make a difference.
4-socket K8L systems benefit because they take advantage of the 4 HT links to provide 1-hop latency to all sockets in the mesh, and can now have external I/O hooked up to ALL processors.
8-socket K8L systems take advantage of two things: the extra HT link is beneficial, and the advanced mesh created by splitting up the HT bus widths means MUCH better performance for 8-way systems.
Woodcrest is impressive as hell, but I will tell you one thing: there's no way in hell it's going to scale well beyond 4-socket systems. This is for the same reasons that have been holding back performance on 4-way Xeon syetems (reduced bus speeds with 4 processors on the bus, too much traffic). The Dual-Independent Bus allows Intel to scale well to 4-way, but no higher. K8L will allow for glueless scaling to 8-way, and will still provide a a cheaper solution than Intel's Dual-Independent Bus for 4-way chipsets and motherboard designs.
Intel: Long live the Front Side Bus! (Score:2, Interesting)
Until Intel has a real answer to HyperTransport, they'll be losing the high-performance, 4+ sockets market to AMD. For smaller two-socket servers, Intel will have to pay the RAM and/or server vendors to make FB-DIMM's price competitive with different flavors of DDR.
Re:Details? (Score:2, Interesting)