Intel Stuffing More Than 8 Cores Into Westmere-EX
The more cores, the more hardcore.
Intel's octacore server chip, the Xeon 7500 Nehalem-EX, is built on the 45nm process. For the next big evolution of the Xeon line, Intel hopes to be pushing even more cores when it takes it flagship to the 32nm Westmere-EX generation.
While the Westmere 32nm technology is in the Xeon 5600, Intel plans to extend that technology to EX sometime next year.
Stephen Smith, vice president and director of PC client operations and enabling at Intel, said during a webcast speech that the upcoming Westmere-EX chips will be targeted at systems with four sockets or more. The good news is that the Westmere-EX chips will be socket compatible for those who have already invested in the latest Xeon servers.
"We are well along in development and we are confident that we have a product that will give us a great performance boost. It will go into the same sockets, so the idea here is the platform is an investment that the OEMs have made," said Smith, according to the IDG.
Although Intel didn't divulge any information on core counts or clock speeds, analysts see that hitting 12 cores (for 24 threads) is a likely possibility given that AMD already has its Magny-Cours product.
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Meh... Doesn't AMD have a 16-core processor slated for an early 2011 release?
Impressive and all, but is there really a large demand for for a 12 core chip? Or will Intel continue to rely on Dell & Best Buy to convince consumers they need multiple cores to multitask explorer and outlook?
Impressive and all, but is there really a large demand for for a 12 core chip? Or will Intel continue to rely on Dell & Best Buy to convince consumers they need multiple cores to multitask explorer and outlook?
Would be awesome if those 12-core chips were in the $400 range. Then it would be doable to stuff two of them on a workstation motherboard without breaking the bank too much.
Impressive and all, but is there really a large demand for for a 12 core chip? Or will Intel continue to rely on Dell & Best Buy to convince consumers they need multiple cores to multitask explorer and outlook?
These are server chips right now. I don't think you will see to many of these at best buy.
12 Core chips are defiantly needed in the server market. Hyper-V, XenServer and VMWare will allow you to further consolidate server infrastructure.
Overkill for any regular consumer that doesn't do rendering or videos (I still want one!).
Norwood06 :
Impressive and all, but is there really a large demand for for a 12 core chip? Or will Intel continue to rely on Dell & Best Buy to convince consumers they need multiple cores to multitask explorer and outlook?
thackstonns:
These are server chips right now. I don't think you will see to many of these at best buy.
It's truly amazing how people can miss the point so badly isn't it? But on another note. Your saying you don't buy your servers from best buy?
Impressive and all, but is there really a large demand for for a 12 core chip? Or will Intel continue to rely on Dell & Best Buy to convince consumers they need multiple cores to multitask explorer and outlook?
Seeing as how these are Xeon CPU's, I would say there is HUGE demand. If you can fit 12 cores in a single socket that used to house 4, or even 8, then you can drastically increase the capicity of your servers without drastically increasing the power consumption or rack space needed.
Intel is falling behind amd has quad 12 core socket boards already out you can buy them and they are going to have a 16 core out in about 11 months.
They also have single socket that is affordable board is $500, 12 core is $1200.
I plan on building one for 3d animation rendering station this summer.
Server chip! SERVER CHIP!!
It's the third word in the article, and it's double underlined.
I suggest the following strategy when making a comment: Read the article (or at least the first paragraph) (or at least the first sentence!) (or at least the beginning of the first sentence!!)
People read the comments to find out additional information, not to see how bad your reading comprehension is...
Seeing as how these are Xeon CPU's, I would say there is HUGE demand. If you can fit 12 cores in a single socket that used to house 4, or even 8, then you can drastically increase the capicity of your servers without drastically increasing the power consumption or rack space needed.
Power savings is nice, and as mentioned, the real use of these chips would be in server virtualization, and CPU-intensive task. I see the biggest advantage to this in the per-socket pricing (VMware being one) that you could save - at a few grand per socket, stuffing 12 cores on a CPU could be very nice.
Server chip! SERVER CHIP!! It's the third word in the article, and it's double underlined.
While I personally know these are server chips and what they're used for, just wanted to say... Not double underlined on my computer. Not underlined at all. That's probably some randomly generated ad thing on your computer.
let's not forget that businesses are not moving towards or expanding their virtualization foot print substantially and aggressively. with most hyper-visors being licensed by the cpu socket, these types of cpus are where it's at.
While I personally know these are server chips and what they're used for, just wanted to say... Not double underlined on my computer. Not underlined at all. That's probably some randomly generated ad thing on your computer.
It's double underlined on both IE and Opera, on two different machines, on my end.
12 Core chips are defiantly needed in the server market. Hyper-V, XenServer and VMWare will allow you to further consolidate server infrastructure.
Our XenServer and VmWare servers need memory not cpu cores...I wish memory was cheaper...We can afford the dual 4 core CPUs but only 32 gig of ram...The CPUs barely click while ram gets eaten away.
How can people bash this? They are making improvements. That's all that matters. AMD is making a chip with more cores you say? Who cares... it'll get left in the dust like they have been. Their acquisition of ATI is the only thing saving their asses right now.
let's not forget that businesses are not moving towards or expanding their virtualization foot print substantially and aggressively. with most hyper-visors being licensed by the cpu socket, these types of cpus are where it's at.
Exactly. This little bugger being socket compatible with my existing nahelem xeons is going to make upgrading my VMWare cluster a real easy task, while adding over double the cpu count without the need of additional VMWare licenses. It wont matter how much this CPU is, if the clusters load continues to go the way it is, i'll upgrade them to this cpu even if they are 2500 a pop.
Begin the Core Wars have.
What would be impressive if they could deliver on the 80 core cpu they promised us with in 5 year.....five years ago.
Impressive and all, but is there really a large demand for for a 12 core chip? Or will Intel continue to rely on Dell & Best Buy to convince consumers they need multiple cores to multitask explorer and outlook?
Do you even know what the word "server" means?
Can someone please do a piece on parallel processing and its future? Why can't anyone else see that this is a waste of money to continue to through cores together. The technology in multi-core processors doesn't appear to be improving much, only the company's ability to put them on the same die.
not long ago with 24 cores (4 sockets) xeon 7400 series was impressive.
now in the near future 24 logical cores on a single processor, again Wou!
For servers, there will always be a demand for more cores. Look
at SGI's Altix UV series which already supports up to 2048 cores
and 16TB RAM in a single system (256 x 8-core XEON 7500 series
CPUs, ie. the Altix UV 1000). They plan to expand this to 32768
CPUs (more than a quarter of a million cores) in future
products.
The low-end UV 10 is a quad-socket system supporting 32 cores
(4 CPUs) and 512GB RAM, which can then be clustered if required.
The mid-range UV 100 offers 768 cores and 6TB RAM. See:
http://www.sgi.com/products/server [...] index.html
http://www.sgi.com/products/server [...] specs.html
http://www.sgi.com/products/server [...] _uv10.html
There are other vendors with quad-socket products, eg. the
Dell R810 and R9xx, but SGI clearly has a demand for systems
with very large numbers of cores single system image, something
which can only be enhanced by having products with more cores
per CPU. There are numerous defense, bio/pharma, geoscience and
other applications which benefit from these improvements.
Ian.
Improvements in performance is always a good thing. If developers are writing big apps that can scale across that many cores, then that's all the better. But to those who are saying consolidation of HW is the main benefit, you have to be a little careful. You only want to go to a certain point as single points of failure become a huge concern. You wouldn't want to lose 50% of your environment as an example. Maybe not even 25% (which is usually a good rule of thumb).
Oh snap! I did not see that coming!
Can someone please do a piece on parallel processing and its future? Why can't anyone else see that this is a waste of money to continue to through cores together. The technology in multi-core processors doesn't appear to be improving much, only the company's ability to put them on the same die.
For a company that has multiple virtual machines with hundreds of users online, this technology is the solution to problems of processing power, space, power consumption, etc.
For one normal user a 4 cores is more than enough today.
The development of applications with support for parallel processing (non-industrial applications or large scale) is still asleep, and it is difficult to awaken. There are other ways to get better performance as GPGPU, but the gpu arquietectura is difficult to support a simple and sustainable way of development.
I think that until the gpu and cpu do not reach a similar architecture or fusion of them, processing curve will have a growth rate not very pronounced.
sorry if do not understand much, English is not my native language jeje!!
Impressive and all, but is there really a large demand for for a 12 core chip? Or will Intel continue to rely on Dell & Best Buy to convince consumers they need multiple cores to multitask explorer and outlook?
You sir are retarded. Just thought I'd point that out
I totally agree.
It's double underlined on both IE and Opera, on two different machines, on my end.
Thanks to adblock plus and noscript, no underlines for me! Those things are totally uber-annoying especially on sites like this where content authors might actually want to hyperlink you to something useful.
will Intel continue to rely on Dell & Best Buy to convince consumers
The Xeon line is for your data center servers and not typical in desktop systems. It is often under-clocked for improved stability and reduced cooling consumption.
For a company that has multiple virtual machines with hundreds of users online, this technology is the solution to problems of processing power, space, power consumption, etc.
This is exactly the market these chips will be best suited for. All our current virtual hosts are 16 cores total (multiple CPU with multiple core) and were stood up 3 years ago. The only bottleneck going to a 12+ core per chip system would be memory per system so that it stays within our current CPU to RAM ratio or increases on the RAM side.
For a company that has multiple virtual machines with hundreds of users online, this technology is the solution to problems of processing power, space, power consumption, etc.For one normal user a 4 cores is more than enough today.The development of applications with support for parallel processing (non-industrial applications or large scale) is still asleep, and it is difficult to awaken. There are other ways to get better performance as GPGPU, but the gpu arquietectura is difficult to support a simple and sustainable way of development.I think that until the gpu and cpu do not reach a similar architecture or fusion of them, processing curve will have a growth rate not very pronounced.sorry if do not understand much, English is not my native language jeje!!
You hit the nail on the head. More efficient, better connected cores are the thing to have given the trend of cloud computing, software as a service, etc. Being able to virtually provision one physical server 12 different ways per chip is amazing. Just imagine what a web site experience will be like with a CPU or two on the server end, dedicated to your will alone. Searches get faster, more detailed, and more interactive. Facebook gets, er, face-ier. Online multimedia like picture and video sharing will be much more personalized (for better or worse). The possibilities are endless.