Intel and IBM both wheeled out their latest high-end chips Monday. Cute how they do that isn’t it.
In Intel’s case it’s the two-billion-transistor Itanium 9300, a k a Tukwila, the device once known as Tanglewood, only about, oh, say, three years late – the thing has been redefined, renamed, tweaked and diddled so many times it’s hard to tell anymore – figure it’s somewhere between two and four years past due. Anyway, two billion transistors is Intel’s personal best and Tukwila quietly started shipping for revenue last month.
In IBM’s case it’s the Power7, out a couple of months sooner than expected, bound for boxes that Blue can use to ward off a Sun-armed Oracle as well as a redirected Cisco and old rival HP.
Tukwila promises to double the performance of its Montecito predecessor.
IBM, on the other hand, has managed an 8x jump over the Power6, and chip-for-chip is more powerful than Intel’s hard-won widget.
Chip groupie Nathan Brookwood describes Tukwila as the “first major overhaul of Itanium since McKinley in 2001” and says that compared to Sun’s ill-fated Rock chip “it’s better late than never.”
Brookwood also says that IBM isn’t given enough credit for delivering Power upgrades in predictable tick-tock fashion, something it’s been doing since 2001, way before Intel coined the phrase.
The 3.5GHz-4GHz Power7 has eight cores – and four threads per core – four times as many cores and eight times as many threads per core as the 5GHz Power6. Tukwila is only a two-threads-per-core quad replacement for the dual-core Montecito while IBM will be able to replace four Power6 chips with one Power7, which should mean a significant cost savings.
If Intel replaces two Montecitos with one Tukwila, Brookwood says “it’s still just breaking even on cores.” At the same 2:1 ratio IBM would be up four cores.
One thing Power can’t do is run Windows and stuff like SQL Server. Itanium can and since Xeon is inching up on Itanium’s RAS skills because of increasingly common platform ingredients, it’s possible that with this generation some of Itanium’s hangers-on could bolt to the eight-core 16-thread Tukwila-socket-compatible Nehalem EX when it arrives.
Anyway, Tukwila has eight threads per processor complements of enhanced Intel Hyper-Threading; uses QuickPath Interconnect technology, Intel’s version of AMD’s HyperTransport technology so there’s no front-side bus; 30MB of cache; is endowed with Turbo Boost Technology to automatically rev performance when needed and conserve power when it’s not based on workload; and – according to the chip’s press agents – has up to 800% the interconnect bandwidth, 500% the memory bandwidth and 700% the memory capacity using industry-standard DDR3 components than Itanium used to have.
Oh, yes, and there’s second-generation Intel Virtualization Technology in the thing; the Intel 7500 chipset can directly assign I/O devices to virtual machines.
Intel Monday announced two new OEMs – well, one out-of-blue, the other merely confirmed. Supermicro, the channel OEM, whose interest was established, is gonna start selling four-socket Tukwila machines.
The surprise is Inspur, a Chinese company evidently with global ambitions that Intel says the Chinese government picked to deliver Itanium solutions. Itanium is gonna be losing Red Hat support although RHEL 5 is good through 2014. Of course, HP represents 85% of Itanium sales and said it would have Tukwila systems out in 90 days.
Between now and 2014 Intel should conceivably field two more versions of Itanium: Poulson, an already late 32nm, 45nm-skipping shrink of the 65nm Tukwila, due maybe who knows in a couple of years, and Kittson about which next to nothing is known except that it should be socket- and binary-compatible with Tukwila and Poulson.
Poulson, Intel said, will have more parallelism, more cores, more cache, Hyper-Threading improvements and instruction-level enhancements compared to Tukwila.
Until then the Itanium 9300 ranges in price from $946 to $3,838 in quantities of 1,000.
Intel would probably like us to repeat that Itanium managed to claw out a $5 billion-a-year systems business in 2008 that probably dropped to $4 billion last year because of the recession but that its RISC rivals, such as they are, are dropping too, probably from $22 billion in ‘08 to $16 billion.
Now about the Power7 and remember that IBM is still the Unix winner with roughly 40% of the market.
Since Oracle is aiming its Sun boxes directly at Blue, IBM said its new Power 750 Express delivers 71% better price/performance than a Sparc Enterprise T5440 server and 280% better price/performance than Sparc Enterprise M5000 and M4000 servers. It’s also supposed to deliver more than 400% better price/performance than the existing HP Integrity rx7640 or the rx6600 servers.
IBM is gonna put out four new Power systems: the Power 780 and Power 770 each with up to 64 Power7 cores, the latter consuming up to 70% less energy for the same number of cores as the Power 570; the Power 755, a high-performance computing cluster node with 32 Power7 cores optimized for analytic workloads; the Power 750 Express, an Energy Star-qualified business server for the mid-market offering four times the processing capacity of its predecessor; and the Power 550 Express in the same energy envelope at a reported 10x the performance of a comparable HP Integrity rx6600.
The Power 750 is supposed to be three times more energy-efficient than the Sparc Enterprise T5440, Sun’s so-called Coolthreads server.
Naturally, the gismos support the advanced virtualization management capabilities of VMControl, which manages a systems pool of multiple Power servers as one entity, which should cut management costs.
The Power 750 Express and 755 should ship February 19; the 770 and 780 should start going out March 16. Planned availability for Systems Director Editions supporting both Power7 and Power6 models – as well as mainframes and x86 boxes – is March 5.
IBM says it’s “vastly increased” the parallel processing capabilities of Power7 systems optimized for databases and delivered a “leap” in throughput computing optimized for running massive Internet workloads.
It also says it’s “dramatically increased” the parallel processing capabilities of its WebSphere, DB2, InfoSphere Warehouse and Cognos middleware for managing Internet, data, transactions and analytics to support Power7 systems. The software will be able to exploit all 32 threads available in a single eight-core Power7, reportedly resulting in performance gains over Intel’s Nehalem chip.
The Power7’s TurboCore mode, which is optimized for database and other transaction-oriented workloads, runs with four cores active and puts most of the resources from all eight cores on the chip behind just the four active cores giving them more cache memory and memory bandwidth, so the clock speed can be increased, driving per-core performance gains.
IBM says its TurboCore mode can maximize the ROI from software by potentially reducing software costs in half for applications licensed per core, while increasing per-core performance.
When not in TurboCore mode, Power7 processors run in so-called MaxCore mode with up to eight cores per socket and four threads per core – 32 threads total. Power7 has so-called Intelligent Threads that can dynamically vary based on workload demand, increasing capacity and total performance gains.
For workloads that need large amounts of memory, or in virtualized environments where more memory is beneficial, clients can use a new Power7 technology called Active Memory Expansion that uses memory compression technology to make the physical memory on the system look to applications as though it was up to twice as big as it actually is, transparently compressing more data into memory and expanding the memory capacity of Power7 systems.
IBM estimates up to a 65% increase in transactions or users could be handled by the same server previously constrained by memory capacity.