Nehalem-EX shipments from Intel begins this month
By Andy Patrizio
Intel's Nehalem-EX, an eight-core Xeon processor based on the x86 design but with many features found in Itanium and other high-end processors used in the most mission-critical scenarios, is set to ship later this month.
Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and AMD (NYSE: AMD) have made great strides over the last few years in the server market, taking more and more market share from what had been the exclusive domain of RISC-based servers and mainframes. In the most recent stats from IDC, x86 servers accounted for more than 90 percent of the market.
But those few RISC servers sold are very expensive, sometimes carrying million-dollar price tags. Companies are willing to pay the big bucks because they need these high-end servers for their most important, mission-critical environments that demand 24/7/365 operation with no downtime and immediate recovery from any potential errors.
Intel customers have competed in this field with systems built on Intel's Itanium processor including the just released four-core Itanium 9300, a.k.a. Tukwila. But Nehalem-EX gives it a serious run for the money.
The Nehalem-EX sits between Intel's Xeon 5500 line of Westmere processors, used in two-socket designs, and the Itanium, used at the high end. The processors will be sold under the Xeon brand name and replace the 7400 family of processors used in four-socket systems.
The EX borrows many design ideas from the Itanium, including new reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) features such as Machine Check Architecture (MCA) Recovery error correction, which is designed to keep the server running in the event of a failure. The processor is able to detect system errors originating in the CPU or system memory and correct them or recover from them.
Nehalem-EX is reported to use a much larger socket design, Socket 1567, but Intel would not confirm this. It's meant for use in servers with four to eight processor sockets, all of them linked with the QuickPath Architecture that was initially designed for the Itanium. It will also offer four memory channels per processor, a bump from the three in current Xeons and putting it on par with AMD's new Magny-Cours processors. IBM (NYSE: IBM) has already said it plans to use the Nehalem-EX in the new eX5 System x servers it recently announced.
Sinking the Itanic?
Intel has not said how fast the processor would be. So far, the only specs released beyond the basic features are that it has 24MB of unifying L3 cache and 2.3 billion transistors.
All of which will undoubtedly have some customers wondering why they should get an Itanium server when Nehalem-EX is darned close in terms of features, but runs x86 apps natively. Shannon Poulin, director of Xeon marketing, said that there is still a place for both.
"A world-class datacenter likely includes products from all three families of our product line; Xeon 5500 products today for 2S [socket] Web infrastructure and front-end applications, Xeon 7400 products for 4S and above platforms that do application development, databases, customer relationship management and virtualize multiple applications on a single box; and Itanium 9300 platforms that support the most mission-critical database and application deployments," he told InternetNews.com via e-mail.
But chip analyst Nathan Brookwood thinks the EX is a threat to Itanium and RISC in general.
"I've talked to folks at IBM who see EX as the biggest threat to Power 7. It's quite likely there will be more Nehalem-EX systems sold this year than Itanium systems. The market dynamics for years have been that x86 continue to get better and better and eat away slowly at the segment that used to be dominated by RISC. So this is one more step in a very long journey," he told InternetNews.com.
There will be people that want "bullet-proof systems" using Power 7 and Itanium and even Oracle's Sparc systems because, while the Nehalem-EX has adopted some RISC features, those chips are mature and offer a whole lot more in terms of mission-critical functionality, added Brookwood, research fellow with Insight 64.
Still, he said "Certainly the EX has more [mission-critical features] than any x86 server chip that Intel's put together and more than even AMD includes in the latest Opterons."
Intel will roll out a new generation of the two-socket Xeons designed under the Westmere microarchitecture later this month. Westmere is a 32-nanometer-process design with some newer features, like built-in AES security.
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