back to article Intel showcases 'transformational' Nehalem

Intel's "Nehalem EP" Xeon 5500 series of processors for two-socket servers were announced this afternoon. Finally. Now, the server market can breathe a sigh of relief and set about the difficult task of trying to peddle better boxes in a worsening economy. Which sure beats trying to sell last year's machines this year. Today, …

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  1. Gary F

    Yeah but...

    ...please tell me when Dell and all the others will be launching servers that use this nice new CPU. Box makers have had pre-production chips for months so they must be ready to launch something this week, surely?

    160% increase in virtualisation scores is brilliant, but I notice Microsoft's Hyper-V wasn't included as a benefactor. I wonder if we have to wait until Windows 2008 R2 (Q1 2010?) to get something from Microsoft that achieves similar improvements, or if they will bring out an intermediate patch?

  2. amanfromMars Silver badge
    Linux

    Anything You can do.... Wwwe can Always do Beta Better in Any and All Parallel AIdDimensions.*

    "Comparing to the IBM Power environment, it is almost humorous."

    I wonder if that comment will be as a red rag to a bull and spur IBM into doing something .... Novel and SunNI with RobotIQs for IT does appear to be a Clashing of Titanic Servers and there can only be One Leader even should it be Resolved as a Joint/Multicored Derivative Futures Adventure of CoInterIndependent Goliaths selling their Dream Virtual Machinery to their Dependent Markets/Client Base.

    * QuITe who Wwwe would be, of course, is Proprietary SMP Information and Privileged IntelAIgents Freely Available to be Known and Easily Accessed via the Exercise of Advanced Binary Beta Algorithms.

    And all of this wonderfully weird and wacky Next Step Change Innovation, does make Microsoft Windows look very Pedestrian/Neanderthal?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Stop

    two socket only

    Thanks but why can't Intel make a four socket box with Nehalem?

    They are very slow followers....

    memory controller on chip....everyone else has already done

    direct chip to chip vs. FSB....been there done that

    multi-threading....been there.

    never believe benchmarks

    lies, damn lies and benchmarks!!!!

  4. Medium Dave
    Coat

    Turbo Boost?

    Now there's a blast from the past. Presumably, all new servers will be beige and have an extra button on the front.

    Mine's the one with Tron in the pocket. On Betamax.

  5. PushF12
    Alert

    AMD did the transformation, and it was to 64-bit

    AMD was responsible for the x86 platform going from 10% to 50% in the last decade because their 64-bit implementation got traction for being affordable, sensible, and backwards compatible.

    Everything in Nehalem is an incremental upgrade, or a gimmick on an incremental upgrade, except the MMU virtualization. (This piece finally obsolesces the fancy software technology in VMware, and makes VMware just another front-end on the hardware.)

    If Intel had their way, then Sparc would still be leading because the alternative would be Itanic.

  6. Erik Aamot
    Coat

    The most important question ...

    When will these be available in a MAC ?

    reaching for my iPhone there

  7. Ash
    Thumb Up

    Price per 1000 units?

    I think you mean "Price when bought in batches of 1000."

    If not, i'll take 4000 of the top-line chip right now! eBay, here I come...

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Thumb Up

    re: yeah but...

    i have had the new CPU's for the last 4 months, (and yeah, there VERY quick) 2008 hyper-v works fine on them. :)

  9. Matt Bryant Silver badge
    Boffin

    Comparitive benching by vendors.....

    As I've mentioned before, never trust a vendor's comparitive benchmark, I'm sure the Xeon comparison to T2 and Power were done with an application that was chosen to highlight Nehalem's capabilities compared to Power. Always compare with the application your business needs to perform well, in your environment, with your data. /rant off

    It's very interesting, though, that Gelsinger made the most noise about "beating" Power. Looks like Intel have decided who their biggest opponent is, and the surprise is it's not AMD's Opteron. I was expecting more on how Nehalem would be the best option for all those customers fleeing the sinking SPARC/Slowaris ship, seeing as that looks like a key target area for the coming few years for all the CPU vendors. All that old SPARC base is potential market growth, new customers to add to the churn of the old installed Xeon base. But then again, he might be trying to highlight Nehalem's advantages versus Power as a way of stopping all those ex-Sun customers porting to Power if IBM does swallow Sun.

    Interesting times ahead!

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    Really that fast?

    > And compared to a Power6-based Power 570 server from IBM, a Nehalem EP machine

    > was one-tenth the cost and delivered 2.45 times the oomph.

    Really?

    2-year old IBM Power6 with 8 cores: TPC-C: 800k

    Fastest Nehalem with 8-cores: TPC-C: 630k.

    http://www.tpc.org

    Still, it's so much better than previous Intel chips.

  11. FathomsDown
    Stop

    Erm...

    So under "certain workloads" (I'm guessing that we are talking single threaded ones here), the new processors are much faster than massively multi core processors from the competition?

    Who'd have thought it? What's next, fire is hot?

  12. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    Knight Rider

    Sorry, but when I read "Turbo Boost" I just heard The Hoff shouting "...KITT!!!" after it. So does it mean these new boxes can jump canyons and artics with only a slight buckling of the chassis (mysteriously gone by the next shot)?! :-D

    "When will these be available in a MAC ?"

    As soon as they do them in translucent hues... since when do Apple customers care about anything boring like performance, over and above how goddamn stylish they all are?!

  13. Anonymous Coward
    Jobs Halo

    Re: The most important question / Knight Rider

    When will these be available on a Mac? Since early March:

    http://www.apple.com/macpro/

    Apple had early access to the processor, as they have on some previous occasions too, so were able to ship products before the official release of the CPUs used therein.

  14. A. H. O. Thabeth

    @ Erik Aamot and the person who title his post "Knight Rider "

    Apple Dual 4-Core as a base line (only because I am lazy and this was the quick selection)

    Two 2.26GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon "Nehalem" processors

    6GB (six 1GB) memory

    640GB hard drive

    18x double-layer SuperDrive

    NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512MB

    DELL™ PowerEdge™ T610 (configured to match above, see notes)

    Manufacture 1 U.K. Price £2,513.00 (ex VAT)

    Manufacture 2 U.K. Price £2,499.00 (Inc VAT)

    Which one is the over priced, "translucent hues" Mac?

    I hope this helps.

    Abdo

    Note 1 This can not be an exact match because the feature set is different,

    e.g. the Dell can have 8x3.5" drive the Mac only 4, and

    I could see an option for a graphics card for the dell.

    Note 2 I didn't add a mouse or keyboard to the price of the dell, because I assume people would have these already.

    Note 3 The Dell does include an O.S.

  15. A. H. O. Thabeth
    Unhappy

    @ Abdo

    What an arse you are!

    Your didn't include the Shipping cost.

    Abdo

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Re: that the era of proprietary and RISC/Unix computing is over.

    if it is, that would be based on economics only, not on quality of chip design. I noticed that even with cherry picked numbers, the performance was pretty close on "hyper expensive" chip, and that was before I saw the comment with the performance comparison that puts the Intel chip below the Power chip. So yes, they might win on a strict equipment cost basis, but a TCO comparison? Not so sure.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The End of Itanium

    Itanic is the biggest loser in this announcement.

  18. Ken Hagan Gold badge
    Joke

    Re: The End of Itanium

    At this point in time, Itanic is only marginally more relevant than Motorola's 68K series. Actually, scrub that, I bet there are more of the latter still doing useful work out there.

  19. Pony Tail

    Itanic is dead except for ostrich HP-UX customers

    Nehalem is the real reason Tukwila will be 12 months late. Tukwila will not be out until November, conveniently after HP's fiscal year end..

    Nehalem is 4.1X for fp_rate_2006, 5.5X for Specjbb_2005, 4.7X Spec_int_rate_2006, and 4.7X for SAP-SD over Itanium

    What idiot would buy Itanium unless they want to pay for 5X the processors and 100X the cost..

    cheers!

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