Intel Out To Transform The World With Nehalem
Intel made its case for transforming the data center Monday, launching its Nehalem-class Xeon 5500 series of server chips with its entire ecosystem in tow at the chip maker's Santa Clara, Calif. campus. More than 70 vendors and whitebox builders are ready with some 230 new products built around the benchmark-busting processor, leading Intel’s Pat Gelsinger to call the first Nehalem DP server chips ’a product we truly believe is transformational.’
’This is the most important server launch we have done since the Pentium Pro,’ said Gelsinger, a senior vice president and general manager of Intel’s Digital Enterprises Group. Under a Xeon-festooned backdrop promising an ’Intelligent Choice’ -- while ’Smarter Choice’ is newly available, that tagline probably wasn’t given much thought at Intel headquarters -- Gelsinger sketched the broad details and put Nehalem through its paces for a pair of eye-opening power management and virtualization demos.
The upshot -- Intel is hitting the market with 17 new enterprise-class server/workstation processors based on its Nehalem microarchitecture, including 14 dual-core and quad-core chips in the Xeon 5500 series (formerly code named Gainestown) ranging in price from $188 to $1,600 for 1,000-unit orders, and three in the Xeon 3500 series (formerly Bloomfield) available for $284, $562 and $999.
Gelsinger’s comparison of the 5500 series to the success of 1995’s Pentium Pro, Intel’s first server workload-optimized chip, may be a case of the chip giant getting ahead of itself considering that these parts have been released all of one day. On the other hand, the new device has already smashed 30 benchmarks for two-socket server processors (and even a few four-socket chips), many by eye-opening margins – 64 percent, 87 percent and 154 percent were numbers that flashed on the screen during Gelsinger’s presentation on benchmarking.
And Nehalem apparently saves its best for virtualized workloads. The processor gets 160 percent better performance over the previous record-holder as per VMware’s VMmark benchmark, the largest performance gain for any of the new records set by the new Xeons.
’We see the 5500 as the perfect platform for server pool flexibility, virtualization and energy efficiency in the data center,’ Gelsinger said.
To that effect, he and an Intel colleague demonstrated a single Xeon 5500-based system running a heavy SQL database workload with no trouble on virtual machines migrated over from three older Intel Woodcrest servers -- and drawing three times less power with the full workload than the older boxes set on idle.
Another demonstration centered around Intel’s new Turbo Boost feature, described by Gelsinger as ’wicked cool technology.’ Turbo Boost, present on several of the new quad-core 5500 series Xeons, acts like a circuit breaker to dynamically shut off individual processor cores that aren’t in use. That will likely show up as savings on the energy bill, but the power savings can also be sent over to the cores that are processing workloads to give them some extra oomph.
Nehalem also brings back Intel’s hyper-threading technology and a number of other improvements over the previous Core generation of Xeon chips that boost power, energy efficiency or both. Gelsinger also promised a very easy transition from these 45-nanometer chips to the next generation of 32nm products code named Westmere, due out by the end of the year or early 2010. The Westmere chips, including a six-core version, will drop into the same motherboard sockets as the Xeon 5500 parts, requiring a simple firmware update to get rolling.
But before that happens, Gelsinger pointed to two paths businesses might take in adopting Nehalem. The first, a one-for-one swap of older single-core Xeon servers for the new parts would deliver nine times the performance in the data center, he contended. Or a customer might go the cost-savings route and replace those older servers with less than an eighth the number of Nehalem systems -- that would get you the same performance, but with a 90 percent reduction in energy costs.
Even more head-spinning, the second path would pay for itself in terms of capital expenditure in just eight months, according to Intel. Which, incidentally, wasn’t even the most ambitious statement of the day -- Hewlett-Packard was promising a three-month ROI for customers swapping out its older Proliant servers for the new ones.
Next: Partners On Board
’It’s not next year’s product, it’s not last year’s. This processor is the big one,’ said Gelsinger as he wound down his keynote. Quite a few Intel partners were inclined to agree.
Intel’s highest-profile OEM and software partners were out in full force at Monday’s event at the chip maker’s Santa Clara campus. HP alone had 11 new servers based on the Xeon 5500 series and promised more than 1,000 SKUs in a complete overhaul of its Proliant lineup of blade, rack and tower servers.
’It’s the biggest launch we’ve ever had and this is the largest announcement that our division has ever come out with,’ said Paul Gottsegen, vice-president of marketing for HP’s Industry Standard Server business. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based computing giant is dubbing its new Nehalem-based server lineup ’G6’ and considers this batch the sixth generation of Proliant systems it has developed.
IBM, historically a bit slow to push out servers based on new Intel chips, was ready right out the gate with its own systems on Monday. ’There’s a lot of talk out there that IBM isn’t committed to x86, but this proves that isn’t true,’ one IBM representative told ChannelWeb.
Dell and Cisco -- a new entrant to the server market -- were also on hand to tout their new Xeon 5500-series servers. Sun Microsystems won’t have its lineup ready until April 14, but the company has worked overtime tweaking its Solaris and Open Solaris operating systems to coincide with the Nehalem launch.
’We’ve done things like develop what we call Predictive Self-Healing in Solaris, so if you get a system panic due to a problem with one of the cores, Solaris can take that core out of the system,’ said Herb Hinstorff, director of business management at Santa Clara-based Sun.
’There are real business opportunities with this new platform plus Solaris for channel partners, whether they’re HP resellers or whitebox builders. They can sell cost efficiency in a very, very competitive environment and Solaris right out of the chute is going to be able to give you those performance and efficiency benefits.’
Microsoft and VMware were also at Intel's campus to push software that they’ve optimized for Nehalem, the latter getting some free publicity up on stage with all the demos and talk around virtualization.
Other details included the release of two 5500 series chips built specifically for the communications and embedded markets, the arrival of Intel’s 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller, and of course, the Intel 5520 chipset and motherboard platform.
Here are the official specs and prices for Intel’s new Nehalem processors (QPI -- Quick Path Interconnect, TB -- Turbo Boost):
XEON 3500 SERIES – UP SERVER
Quad-Core, 130W
W3520 (2.66GHz, 1333MHz, 8MB L3, 4.8GT/s QPI, TB) - $284
W3540 (2.93GHz, 1333MHz, 8MB L3, 4.8GT/s QPI, TB) - $562
W3570 (3.20GHz, 1333MHz, 8MB L3, 6.4GT/s QPI, TB) - $999
XEON 5500 SERIES – SERVER/WORKSTATION
Dual-Core, 80W
E5502 (1.86GHz, 800MHz, 4MB L3, 4.8GT/s QPI) - $188
Quad-Core, 60W
L5506 (2.13GHz, 800MHz, 4MB L3, 4.8GT/s QPI) – $423
L5520 (2.26GHz, 1066MHz, 8MB L3, 5.86GT/s QPI, TB) – $530
Quad-Core, 80W
E5504 (2.0GHz, 800MHz, 4MB L3, 4.8GT/s QPI) - $224
E5506 (2.13GHz, 800MHz, 4MB L3, 4.8GT/s QPI) - $266
E5520 (2.26GHz, 1066MHz, 8MB L3, 5.86GT/s QPI, TB) - $373
E5530 (2.40GHz, 1066MHz, 8MB L3, 5.86GT/s QPI, TB) - $530
E5540 (2.53GHz, 1066MHz, 8MB L3, 5.86GT/s QPI, TB) - $744
Quad-Core, 95W
X5550 (2.66GHz, 1333MHz, 8MB L3, 6.4GT/s QPI, TB) - $958
X5560 (2.80GHz, 1333MHz, 8MB L3, 6.4GT/s QPI, TB) - $1,172
X5570 (2.93GHz, 1333MHz, 8MB L3, 6.4GT/s QPI, TB) - $1,386
Quad-Core, 130W
W5580 (3.20GHz, 1333MHz, 8MB L3, 6.4GT/s QPI, TB) - $1,600
XEON 5500 SERIES – EMBEDDED
Quad-Core, 38W
L5508 (2.0GHz, 800MHz, 8MB L3, 4.8GT/s QPI, TB) - $423
Quad-Core, 60W
L5518 (2.13GHz, 1066MHz, 8MB L3, 5.86GT/s QPI, TB) - $530