Intel charges premium for Xeon E7 scalability

Intel has refreshed its high-end x64-based server processors with the launch of the "Westmere-EX" chips, now known to the outside world as the Xeon E7s, and it wants some more money for them than you might have been budgeting. In an indicator of the confidence that Intel has in its dominance of the x64 server racket, the …

[Joe Greer]

AMD has them beat for Virtual Machines

Hyperthreading has to be turned off on those heavily packed machines running virutal servers, virtual desktops, Oracle, MS SQL, Exchange or Terminal Server.

So the Dell R815 is still king of the VM hill with 48 cores...

[James Turner]

Re: AMD has them beat for Virtual Machines

Is that still the case? I know HT used to be a bit of a dog, but the current versions are much better.

VMware's vSphere best practices guide states "For the best performance we recommend that you enable hyper-threading".

Anandtech have some benchmarks from when Opteron 6100 and the Xeon 7500 were new and the Xeon was faster ( http://www.anandtech.com/show/3894/server-clash-dellr815/10 ).

If the E7 is faster still...

[Chopper3]

Joe that's not been the case since the introduction of the Nehalem architecture

And the HP DL960 G7 already has 8 x 8-core CPUs (plus HT) already, this update will make it 8 x 10 cores - do I don't know where your 'king' bit comes in.

[Anonymous Coward]

HT performance

My understanding was that the performance issues people originally reported with HyperThreading were mostly related to the naïvety of the schedulers on the software side. After all at worse you've got yourself a second register set, which even if there's no real direct benefit can still make context switches for frequently running tasks vastly cheaper.

[Billl]

Itanic Killer

How again is Intel not trying to kill Itanium? HP-UX, if not in the process of being ported, will have to be, or will they go the route of running HP-UX on an interpreter? That would be in keeping with HP-UX's and Intel's promise of supporting HP-UX for many years to come and still prove Oracle right that Itanic is dead.

Will Oracle then support HP-UX on Xeon?

[David 141]

Oracle

Why would Oracle want to help HP-UX when they own Solaris?

(Also, where's the Larry "What a big Yacht I have" Ellison icon?)

[Kiralexi]

Title

Billl, why do you assume this is an Itanic Killer? Poulson should be similarly fast or a little faster when it comes out.

[Billl]

re: Title

"...why do you assume this is an Itanic Killer?"

Because:

1. Intel states that this chip can run any load in the world -- which I conclude includes Itanic

loads.

2. Intel has moved high-end RAS features into this chip, which makes you wonder why you

really need Itanic?

3. QPI is common between the chips, removing any kind of value Itanic may of had.

4. Because Oracle started the rumor that Intel planned to kill Itanic and this new chip just feeds

into that storyline.

[Kiralexi]

No.

Itanium is faster (when Poulson comes out, theoretically) and more scalable. Fast x86 chips have been around, and billed as "RISC killers," before. They still stay largely constrained to the low end.

[Andrew Garrard]

That's not a premium...

The price difference between dual- and quad-connected Opterons was a premium. This is just a little bit of milking of the high end. That said, Sandy Bridge seems to be enough of a performance boost in core design that I suspect anyone in a position to wait a few months might be very well advised to do so - so I'd almost expect Intel to be discounting their current line.

[ash9.5]

$$ Intel inside $$

If you didn’t know why Intel bought McAfee in light of AMD's Fusion, it should be clearer now. Intel has fortified its position in the HI-END server market, and no one is going to compete with them up there ( monopoly), hence the price mark-ups to compensate for mid and low end of computer market which will be owned by AMD...Intel can’t make a cheap chip, and you will pay.

Nice time to buy the stock

asH