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To: johnd who wrote (114804)	10/23/2000 8:47:32 PM
From: Elmer	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Re: "What is the technical limitation beyond 700Mhz for 8-way, 4-way?" Higher frequency Xeons supporting 4-way and 8-way will be available in Q1 I believe. EP

To: johnd who wrote (114804)	10/23/2000 11:00:22 PM
From: Tony Viola	Respond to of 186894

What is the technical limitation beyond 700Mhz for 8-way, 4-way? 4-ways, 8-ways, etc. require a lot of cache memory for performance in the applications, like database, in which they're used. Intel puts 1 MB or 2 MB L2 cache on the same die as the processor for these Xeons. With that many parallel CPUs, the clock speed of each is not as critical as with one or two ways. There might also be a speed/power tradeoff because of the very big caches dissipating power on the same die as the CPU (power goes up with clock speed for MOS devices). One way and two way servers use either PIII or PIII Xeon with 256 KB of on die cache. They run up to 1 GHz. Right now, except for a couple of, you might say, out of the mainstream servers, Intel is "stuck at" 8-way for tightly coupled SMP servers. As others have pointed out, however, you can cluster many 8-ways (or 4-ways), to build much larger configurations. Paul pointed out a 24 node, 8-way cluster for 192 CPUs total. The out of mainstream >8 way scale-up servers available today are a 32-way from Unisys, and EMC/DGN just announced a 64-way. These are also both Xeon 700 MHz. BTW, re "only" 700 MHz, Sun is still at 450 MHz. They announced 750, and then 900 later, but they're only shipping the 750 in workstations. No servers > 450 until at least December, I believe. Tony