Intel, AMD Push x86 Chips into High-End Server Market

by Jeffrey Burt

AMD’s new eight- to 12-core Opteron 6000 series offers twice the performance of the company’s six-core “Istanbul” chips and supports four channels of DDR3 memory for up to two-and-a-half times the overall memory bandwidth.

AMD officials say the new “Magny-Cours” Opterons will make it easier and less expensive for businesses to move from two-socket servers to four-socket systems.

Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel’s Data Center Group, shows off a new Xeon 7500 series chip during the launch event March 30.

Intel’s new eight-core “Nehalem EX” processor is expandable to include from two to 256 chips per server and has an average performance three times that of the chip maker’s current Xeon 7400 series.

Dell’s 2U, four-socket rack server includes the company’s new Fail Safe Virtualization feature, which promises greater failover protection for virtualized data centers.

Dell’s three new Xeon 7500-based servers, including the 2U PowerEdge R810, have the company’s new Flex Memory Bridge feature, which lets IT administrators decide whether to ramp up the memory capacity or the processing power.

HP rolled out the first of its ProLiant G7 servers, including the DL 385 G7, in conjunction with AMD’s Opteron 6000 launch. All the ProLiants feature HP’s multiple power management technologies.

Launched weeks ahead of Intel’s Xeon 7500 rollout, the ultrascalable eX5 systems include the four-socket System x3850 X5, the BladeCenter HX5 and the System x3690 X5, an entry-level offering that officials say will be the most powerful two-socket server on the market.

SGI will offer the Opteron 6000 chips throughout its Scale Out Rackable and CloudRack server lines, as well as on its Altix Ice HPC clusters and Octane III personal supercomputer, pictured here. SGI also announced the availability of its four-socket Altix UV 10 server powered by Intel’s Xeon 7500 chips.

Cray’s new CX1000-S supercomputer offers up to 128 Xeon 7500 cores built to take advantage of Intel’s QuickPath Interconnect technology.

Appro is outfitting its entire two- and four-socket server platforms with Opteron 6000 chips. The upgraded systems, including the Hyper Clusters and Xtreme-X supercomputer series, pictured here, will be available in April.

NEC’s Express5800/A1080a system is aimed at environments struggling with managing with virtualization or blade server sprawl.