Re: The ES-7000/200 packs the latest Xeon MP (multiprocessor) chips from Intel, running at either 1.4GHz or 1.6GHz
Xeon MP 1.4 is a 512K cache chip, Xeon MP 1.6 isn't out till next quarter.
So this high end machine is using low priced, small cache Xeons where it once would have used large cache Xeons.
IBM, Micron, Dell, and HP used to sell workstations with large cache Xeons. Those have all been replaced by small cache Xeons.
The main reason, IMHO, is that Intel used to be able to hold back on shipping its best binsplit chips to keep high end pricing associated with the production sweet spot. This meant that they could produce large cache chips nearly as fast as their small cache chips.
With AMD forcing Intel to push the performance of its shipping chips as hard as possible, they can no longer hold back the clock speed of the small cache chips, which means that the harder to produce large cache chips must be clocked at the speeds otherwise seen only in very cheap entry level machines.
A big cache chip, clocked 30% slower than a small cache chip, will rarely be any faster than the small cache chip, especially when the cache is only 8-way.
In the good old days, the big cache chips were clocked as high, or nearly as high, as the small cache chips, and it was easy to justify a big price differential.
No longer. |
