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.

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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

Montecito Overview

Up to 8 socket glueless. – Higher scalability with OEM chipsets. • System integration and new system interfaces. – Integrated Memory Controllers and Router.

Link to PDF Here:
http://www.hotchips.org/archives/hc20/3_Tues/HC20.26.911.pdf

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

Cray Jaguar Takes Top Supercomputer Spot from IBM Roadrunner

After more than a year as the world’s fastest supercomputer, IBM’s Roadrunner system was knocked down to the second spot by Cray’s Jaguar. Cray’s XT5 system got a boost when the computer maker swapped out the quad-core AMD Opterons for the six-core “Istanbul” chips, ramping up the power to more than 224,000 processing cores. Sun and SGI also were represented in the top 10 of the Top500 list of the fastest systems.

Link To Article:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Cray-Jaguar-Takes-Top-Supercomputer-Spot-from-IBM-Roadrunner-861748

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.

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