Intel to Launch Eight-core Nehalem-EX This Month

Intel will release its fastest and highly anticipated eight-core Nehalem-EX server processor later this month, a company executive said late Thursday.

The processor will be targeted at four-socket servers, said Shannon Poulin, Xeon platform director at Intel. Each physical core will be able to run two threads simultaneously, giving the chip 64 virtual processing cores on servers.

Intel's CEO Paul Otellini has described Nehalem-EX as Intel's fastest processor to date. The chip maker announced the processor last year, and said it would release the chip in the first half of this year, but did not provide an exact release date.

Poulin declined to provide the clock speed of the chips. However, the company has said it will include 24MB of cache, and 2.3 billion transistors.

Read Full Article Here:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/190906/intel_to_launch_eightcore_nehalemex_this_month.html

CeBIT 2010 : Mission-critical features now in Nehalem-EX parts.

Brits choose Altix UV supers to fight cancer

The Altix UV massively parallel supers might not be shipping until the third quarter of this year, but Silicon Graphics is lining up customers who want to get the box early. The latest customer to ink a deal for an Altix UV is the United Kingdom's Institute of Cancer Research.

Because Intel has yet to launch the "Beckton" eight-core Nehalem-EX processors that are the compute engines in the Altix UV machines, the details are a bit sketchy on exactly what ICR is buying, and the organization did not divulge what systems it currently has in place in Reading, where ICR does research and simulations to come up with new treatments for a variety of cancers.

ICR was founded in 1909 and is a college in the University of London. It is partnered with the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust. According to ICR's 2009-2015 strategic planning report, the researchers laboring at the facility were the first to figure out that DNA damage causes cancer and figured out the link between smoking and lung cancer. ICR has drilled down deeper into the cell genetics to find out what genes are associated with which cancers, leading to earlier detection, and it has synthesized chemotherapy drugs and tweaked radiotherapy techniques so they are less toxic and more effective.

Read Full Article Here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/29/sgi_altix_uv_icr/

Intel Expects More Enterprise Dollars in 2010

Despite a super-positive fourth-quarter earnings call, Intel wasn't very pleased with enterprise spending in 2009, instead noting that consumers drove the company's revenue up.

"It was not a robust year in the enterprise," said Paul Otellini, CEO, Intel.

Otellini also expects that to change in 2010 while Intel does its part in helping push the corporate market. Not only will Intel release its eight-core Nehalem EX Xeon processor for servers with four or more sockets, but the chip maker also plans to replace every chip in its server portfolio with 32nm Westmere parts, and do so within the next 90 days, Otellini said.

Read Full Article Here:
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/maximum_it/intel_expects_more_enterprise_dollars_2010

Intel to release Westmere server chips in three months

Intel plans to release next-generation Xeon server processors based on the Westmere microarchitecture in the next three months, the company said on Thursday.

Intel plans to refresh its line of Xeon server chips as it ramps up chip production to the 32-nanometer process, said Paul Otellini, Intel's CEO, during a financial earnings call. Intel last week released the first Westmere chips for desktops and laptops, and Xeon server chips are next in line, Otellini said.

The last refresh for server chips was in March last year, when the company announced a range of Xeon 5500 series and 3500 series chips based on the Nehalem architecture. The chips were made using the 45-nm process.

The highly anticipated eight-core Nehalem-EX server chip will also be released in the first half, an Intel spokesman said on Thursday. Nehalem-EX will be Intel's fastest server chip to date, Otellini said during the call. The chip will be manufactured using the 45-nm process.

Read Full Article Here:
http://www.itworld.com/hardware/92819/intel-release-westmere-server-chips-three-months

Intel Sees Strong Q4, Fueled by New Products, Consumer Demand

Otellini also said Intel was planning to refresh its entire line of server portfolio with 32-nm processors, and noted the improvements in performance and energy efficiency in the company’s upcoming eight-core “Nehalem EX” processor for servers with four or more sockets.

“Nehalem EX represents the biggest increase in performance in the history of the Xeon brand,” he said.

Otellini said he expects enterprises will see some of the pressure being taken off their budgets, and that unlike in 2009, they will have good reason to refresh their hardware, whether it’s servers or PCs. Still, neither he nor Smith would venture any predictions for corporate spending in 2010.

Read Full Article Here:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Desktops-and-Notebooks/Intel-Sees-Strong-Q4-Fueled-by-New-Products-Consumer-Demand-535284/

AMD's Server Roadmap Plots a Course for HPC

Our recent coverage of AMD's Financial Analyst Day outlined the chipmaker's overall server strategy for the next couple of years, but left a lot to the imagination with regard to how all this might play out in the high performance computing space. The presentation for the analysts barely acknowledged the HPC market, instead emphasizing AMD's main thrusts in the mainstream server and client segments. In a more recent conversation with John Fruehe, AMD's director of product marketing for the server and embedded group, we were able to get a better idea of how the company sees its HPC prospects for 2010 and beyond.


One might wonder how much AMD -- or Intel, for that matter -- thinks about the HPC market these days. Despite a better growth rate than the mainstream server market, HPC still only represents between 2 to 10 percent of server chip revenue, depending on who you talk to. In the commodity chip business, that's too small a segment to inspire separate processor designs, but too big to ignore. "The beauty of HPC," says Fruehe, "is that you have an opportunity to sell large numbers of processors in a single shot." According to him, that is reason enough to stay in the game.


And in any case, many mainstream enterprise applications require essentially the same performance characteristics as HPC workloads: large numbers of fast cores and high memory bandwidth. The soon-to-be-released 45nm Magny-Cours Opteron sports 8 or 12 cores and four memory channels. That design, says Fruehe, is well-suited to HPC workloads, and he believes it will help them capture more of the server market in 2010. Magny-Cours' current competition is the quad-core Nehalem EP, which has three memory channels, and the 8-core Nehalem EX that can support up to eight sockets. The idea is that Magny-Cours will outrun Nehalem EP on memory bandwidth and out-compete Nehalem EX on price and power consumption.

Read Full Article Here:
http://www.hpcwire.com/features/AMDs-Server-Roadmap-Plots-a-Course-for-HPC-80909942.html

Intel's server history: From the Pentium Pro to Nehalem

Oracle OpenWorld 2009: Nehalem-EX Demo w/Machine Check Architecture

Watch as Mitch Koyama describes the upcoming Nehalem-EX platform and demonstrates the MCA feature.

The Intel Itanium is tottering towards death, analyst reckons

A report from senior analyst Jon Peddie suggests that Intel's 64 bit flagship microprocessor, the Itanium, is dead in the water. So is it a turkey?

In his latest musings, Peddie, the CEO of Jon Peddie Research, said that the "Itanium is trying to sneak out the back door." He said that when he was at the annual Supercomputing conference in Portland, there were no Itanium related announcements.

Read Full Article Here:
http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/44828-the-intel-itanium-is-tottering-towards-death-analyst-reckons

Intel and IBM demonstrate 128-thread Nehalem-EX server

HP, SGI, Cray and Dell Show Off New Systems at Supercomputing 2009

Industry-standard technology, GPUs and energy efficiency were among the key themes running throughout the Supercomputing 2009 show in Portland, Ore. At the show, which wraps up Nov. 20, a number of vendors, including Cray, Dell, HP and SGI, showed off new and enhanced high-end systems, many of which are designed to enable businesses and HPC (high-performance computing) environments to ramp up performance and density while driving down operational, capital and power costs. In addition, Intel unveiled that it will offer a "Nehalem EX" Xeon processor optimized for supercomputing, while the chip maker boasted that 402 of the top 500 fastest supercomputers in the world are powered by its processors. Rival AMD took the No. 1 spot, with the Opteron-powered "Jaguar" computer from Cray knocking off IBM's "RoadRunner" at the top of the list. Here are a few of the new systems OEMs showed off at the show. 

Link To Article Here:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/HP-SGI-Cray-and-Dell-Show-Off-New-Systems-at-Supercomputing-2009-240139/

SGI previews UltraViolet Nehalem EX blade clusters

Like the Altix 4700 machines, the Altix UV boxes are based on a blade architecture. The Nehalem EX chips are designed to be used in servers with four sockets or more, and its related Boxboro chip can be used to make glueless eight-socket servers packing up to 64 cores in a single symmetric multiprocessing image. But there is no law that says you have to build a basic blade with four sockets.

Link to Article Here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/16/sgi_altix_uv_preview/print.html

SGI Intros Supercomputer With Intel Nehalem EX

SGI Intros Supercomputer With Intel Nehalem EX



The SGI Altix UV high-performance computing system reaches 18.6 teraflop per second.


By Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek
November 17, 2009 02:43 PM


SGI HPC System With Intel (NSDQ: INTC) Nehalem EXSGI has introduced a high-performance computing system that can leverage Intel's eight-core Xeon server processor, scheduled to ship early next year.


The SGI Altix UV, unveiled Monday at the SC09 supercomputer conference in Portland, Ore., is targeted at large-scale databases and data analytic environments. The system can combine Intel's highest core chip, codenamed Nehalem EX, with SGI's NUMAlink 5 interconnect to deliver its highest performance of 18.6 teraflop per second. A teraflop is a trillion calculations.

Read Full Article Here:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/supercomputers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=221800395&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_ALL

The inside track on Nehalem-EX

Intelligent and Expandable High-End Intel® Server Platform, Codenamed Nehalem-EX

As the world’s most widely deployed server, IT has grown to rely on Intel® Xeon® processors for their energy-efficient performance, reliability, and virtualization capabilities built into the hardware. And at this year’s Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, Intel Senior Fellow Stephen Pawlowski took the stage to discuss the next-generation expandable segment server processor, codenamed Nehalem-EX (PDF 205KB). In production in the second half of 2009, its performance increase will be dramatic, posting the highest-ever jump from a previous generation processor1. Nehalem-EX will feature up to eight cores inside a single chip supporting 16 threads and 24 MB of cache. For server consolidation,virtualization, cloud computing, data demanding applications, and other technical computing environments, Nehalem-EX greatly improves scalable performance, memory bandwidth and capacity, flexibility, and provides advanced reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features.

Download the Full PDF Here:
http://ipip.intel.com/go/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/IDF-Tech-Briefing_Nehalem-EX.PDF

BMW using Nehalem-EX to save money and boost performance!

From ITPRO.CO.UK:

BMW is also set to switch 1,000 servers to the yet to be released Nehalem EX. For the refresh of two- and four-socket Xeon platform servers, the firm compared EX servers to other suppliers.

“From that, what we got is a smaller energy footprint of four socket with Nehalem than with the existing platform,” he said.

He added the EX lets BMW double its virtualisation ratio, from 10 to 15 virtual machines per server to 20 to 30.

“We think we will order bigger servers in future years as virtualisation is key for our data centre as we have the same power problems,” as faced by many, he said, adding that virtualiation and other efficiencies with Nehalem EX cuts consumption by a third – saving 100,000 euros a year on power use alone.

http://www.itpro.co.uk/617215/bmw-saves-with-nehalem-ep-and-ex

Could IBM be building "glueless" eight-socket systems?

Long time chip industry observer, Eachus, speculates on The Motley Fool:

Hmm. Even in the Intel presentation you linked, slide 15 talks about IBM's 5th generation X series chipset. I do expect IBM to sell standard 4xNehalem-EX boxes, but I think they will use their own chipset in larger systems. Could IBM just be designing an I/O chip of their own, and be building "glueless" eight-socket systems? Possible, but IBM has a lot of institutional knowledge about building multiCPU systems with various CPU ISAs. I'm fairly sure that they would take one look at Beckton and conclude that their existing technology could support two Beckton chips with a little work to convert to what is now called Quickpath. We are talking a few man-years to add Quickpath to their current X-4 chip, vs. hundreds of man years for a complete redesign. Which would you choose? ;-)

http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=28077140&sort=postdate

Intel Previews Intel Xeon® 'Nehalem-EX' Processor

This new platform from Intel is going to enable so many possibilities!!!

8x8 servers?  Wow!

http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20090526comp.htm

Intel set to release 8-Socket Glueless platform in early 2010

The demos they were interested were the Nehalem 4-socket demos. They wanted to see this 8-core and 2.3 billion transistors platform and the applications that leverage this 32-core machine. This is an amazing new Intel platform targeted to be released in early 2010. OEM can design 2-socket to 8 socket Nahelem-EX platform gluelessly, and higher configuration with their own node controllers. Currently, we are expecting 15 8-socket and above configuration systems from 8 OEMs to come to the market at launch.


From the Server Room Blog:
http://communities.intel.com/community/openportit/server/blog/authors/hfcheng