Intel Nehalem EX servers will not ship until earlier next year. For early adopters, it'll be a forklift upgrade.
Earlier today, Intel gave a preview of its upcoming high-end server chip dubbed “Nehalem EX” to a small group of journalists and analysts in San Francisco.
The 8-cores Nehalem-EX chip will be in production later this year and for sale in systems in early next year.
In launching the Nehalem EX, Intel will finally have a worthy competitor to AMD’s Opteron chip for the high-end server market (4 processors/sockets or more); Intel is currently shipping an appalling 6-cores server chip (Xeon 7400) that is no match, even for Opteron’s quad-core Shanghai processor.
“With Nehalem EX, Intel has aggressively attack the constraint on performance of the previous chips, including the amount of memory bandwith, memory capacity, cache, QPI links… This is going to be a really powerful chip when it comes out. There’s no doubt in my mind that AMD’s dominance of the 4P and above space will be seriously challenged by the Nehalem EX,” explains Insight64 analyst Nathan Brookwood.
But until early next year, AMD has the upper-hand on the high-end server market and knows it.
“The equivalent to their Nehalem EX and Dunnington processors are our Opteron 8000 series processors in 2009 and in 2010, it will be our 6000 series (Magny-Cours) processors.
The thing you need to remember is that we offer processors for 4-socket servers and higher that have direct connect architecture today. Intel customers are still forced to leverage their Dunnington processors for 4-socket and higher that uses a front-side bus to access memory which tends to be more inefficient in multi-socket servers.
When we launch our six-core Istanbul processors next month, they will be available in 2P, 4P and 8P configurations. If you want Direct Connect Architecture with an Intel solution in 4P and higher, you are forced to wait until their Nehalem EX part is available [next year!],” said Phil Hughes, an AMD spokesman.
Intel’s Nehalem EX is a “forklift” upgrade
With Nehalem EX, Intel is partially moving away from using buffered memory – which consumes more power and costs more than standard memory – by adopting DDR3 memory and integrating the “buffers” on the motherboard; still making it a more complex solution, which could potentially affect memory performance.
“The devil will be in the details and how Intel is implementing this,” added Brookwood who thinks Intel will have a hard time to convince customers to do a “forklift” upgrade to Nehalem EX from their current Xeon systems.
Here’s a video excerpt of our conversation with Boyd Davis, the general manager of Intel’s server platforms group marketing who conducted this morning briefing, and where he talks about Intel’s VT Flex Migration feaure which lets customers run virtual machines on Xeon servers (Core2 and Nehalem), despite their architecture differences.
IBM on the power of Intel’s Nehalem EX
And for Alex Yost, IBM’s vice president for System x (IBM’s x86 servers) and BladeCenter, Nehalem EX servers will be the most powerful X86 servers, bar none.
Finally, here’s Yost’s presentation at the Nehalem EX briefing:
Great blog you have, the articles here are very well written.