Intel 'Nehalem' Xeons poised for March 31 launch

Chip maker Intel has been dropping hints like water balloons from the rooftops that its "Nehalem" Xeon EP processors for two-socket servers will arriv before the end of the quarter. And it looks like the chips will finally fall where they may on March 31. As it turns out, Intel and x64 server maker Sun Microsystems - Intel's …

[Ty]

Apple already has them....

PC beige box makers playing catch-up as usual... zzzzz

Wise up Windoze fanboi ignorami

[N]

Smug grins

As Apple announced last Tuesday.

[David Halko]

Nice to see the extra memory bandwidth

'nuff said

[E]

Gotta say it

Will a quad socket box get me 100+ FPS in Crysis?

Seriously though, this is a good thing. The 4+ socket market has been boring for the past few years.

[Jake]

YAY!

Finally, ive been looking for pricing over in the UK and nothing, and we all know its not the same price as it is in the States, with the E55** series being roughly the same value in £ as it is in $.

Shame really that.

Still, I can start dreaming and they can pop up on Xtreme Systems.

And I can tell the team at my school about them too =D

[Anonymous Coward]

when can I buy one

Anyone comment on how long it will be before dell etc get these into shipping servers?

[E]

@AC

There are pre-release Dell quad socket Nehalem boxes in existence, some premium customers have them already. I am told April release IIRC.

[Anonymous Coward]

So much for Tukwila, Right?

It looks like Nehalem EX will be four times as fast with roughly the same transistor count and available more than six months sooner so one has to wonder. HP should have a boiler room full of people right now porting HP-UX to Nehalem. According to Intel Tukwila will only be twice as fast as Montvale and that's only because it has twice the core count and Quickpath. The Itanic was probably a bad idea though it did have its day. When you need to have 24MB or more of cache and that many execution units to support a dual core CPU at a blazing 1.66 MHz you clearly have a problem. I had a DEC Alpha well over a decade ago with compilers that could do the same things that EPIC claims to do if you compiled and bound the whole program at once. Plus a chip that had aggressive branch prediction and instruction reordering. So one has to wonder what HP was thinking when the PA-RISC 8200 was arguably the first truly four way superscalar microprocessor. Why throw away half of your performance optimization for Taliban style ideology? If HP doesn't port HP-UX to Nehalem which will require some work due to the endian issues I don't see how it can survive because of the delays in delivery of Itanium upgrades. Montvale was originally touted to be a 3+ GHz chip and instead it ramped up an astounding 0.06 MHz. It's pretty obvious where Intel is putting their R+D money and it obviously isn't Itanic. At this point you could probably build a Nehalem emulator that would outperform Tukwila at one third the cost per core.