PRESTONIA STARS AT INTEL CHIP SHOW
In addition...,
there was a joint IBM/Intel demo on a three tier B2B (.NET - enabled) environment, featuring IBM DB2 on
a McKinley pre-release server (as well as mid tier apps running out of a Xeon/Prestonia box). The IBM guy reiterated IBM is going to ship (up to ) 16way McKinley servers on announcement. (ETA mid 2002) <my note>.
- see full coverage in Richard Wirt's keynote at:
intel.com
-----Original Message-----
From: HPCwire [mailto:hpcwire@tgc.com]
Sent: Friday, March 01, 2002 9:35 AM
To: Pareti, Joseph
Subject: 102211 PRESTONIA STARS AT INTEL CHIP SHOW 03.01.02
PRESTONIA STARS AT INTEL CHIP SHOW 03.01.02
COMMERCIAL NEWS HPCwire
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Michael Kanellos reported for ZDNet News: Intel unveiled its first server chip
based on the Pentium 4 architecture as it continues to stake a larger claim in
the upper echelons of the computing world. The company's new Xeon chip,
code-named Prestonia, features a host of improvements that will, along with
complementary technology coming out the same day, provide a performance boost
to one- and two-processor Intel-based servers.
To date, Intel has sold Xeon chips based on the older Pentium III architecture
in this market, although the company already sells a Pentium 4/Xeon similar to
Prestonia in the workstation market.
"Depending on the particular benchmark you use, it is 20 to 30 to 50 percent
faster," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Insight 64. "You're not going to
get twice the performance, but you get more, and it doesn't cost much more."
Compaq Computer, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Dell Computer, among others, showed
off new servers based on Prestonia this week at the Intel Developer Forum, a
four-day conference dedicated to all things Intel.
Among other highlights, Intel displayed the first Pentium 4 for mobiles,
discussed a low-power mobile chip for 2003 called Banias, present updates on
tech standards, and sketched out how Moore's Law will begin to affect other
parts of the industry.
Prestonia in some ways also marks the start of an active year in the lucrative
server market for the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant. Along with
Prestonia, Intel will release the E7500 chipset, code-named Plumas, marking
the effective return of the company into the server chipset market. Chipsets
manage data traffic for the processor and connect the processor to memory and
other components.
In March, at the CeBit trade show in Germany, Intel will release a Pentium
4-based Xeon that can be used in servers capable of handling four or more
processors, according to sources. These chips will also sport a new 1MB third
level of cache, reservoirs of memory located near the processor for rapid data
access.
Starting next week, Intel will also crank up the momentum on McKinley, the
next version of the Itanium chip, which will compete directly against chips
from Sun Microsystems and IBM.
While Intel controls approximately 90 percent of the one- and two-processor
server market, and a substantial portion of the four-way market, it's a
relative stranger to the highest regions of the server market.
The company has touted McKinley as its entry vehicle here, but slow customer
acceptance, a potential lack of software and macroeconomic circumstances could
stump its effort.
Concurrently, the company will likely begin to more openly discuss the
successors to McKinley, including Madison, Montecito, Deerfield and Chivano.
Prestonia enhances the Xeon line in three ways, according to Lisa Hambrick,
director of enterprise processor marketing at Intel. First, by switching to
the Pentium 4 architecture, Intel can drastically boost the clock speed. The
old server Xeon topped out at 1.4GHz. The new one debuts at 1.8GHz, 2GHz and
2.2GHz, and will eventually pass 10GHz, she said.
"You can't reach that with a Pentium III," Hambrick said. "You start to
flatten out. You can only go so high in frequency."
Second, the chip, in conjunction with chipsets and other components, will
feature wider and faster buses--data pathways between the processor and
everything else in the computer. Greater aggregate bandwidth means greater
performance.
Prestonia, for instance, comes with a 400MHz main bus between the processor
and memory, faster than the 133MHz bus on Pentium III Xeons. The chips will
also be capable of accessing data from 16GB of memory vs. just 12GB before.
Prestonia will also work with chipsets featuring PCI-X, an input-output
channel between the chipset and storage devices or networks that runs at
133MHz, twice as fast as the older PCI standard. Plumas, which features six
PCI-X channels, can handle 3.2GB of data per second.
Third, the chips will come with hyper-threading, a new technology from Intel
that lets a single chip execute two applications or processes at the same
time. In a hypothetical example, if one of the processor's integer units is
churning graphics calculations, hyper-threading will allow the floating-point
unit to tackle another problem. It's similar to having two processors, but not
as powerful.
"They may be glamorizing it a little bit, but the claims are valid," said Dean
McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. "There will be ample
opportunity to exploit the hardware resources."
One benefit of hyper-threading is that most current applications that have
been designed (or multi-threaded) to run on two processor servers can get some
advantage out of it, Hambrick said. Some companies are also further
fine-tuning their applications specifically for wringing out performance from
hyper-threaded chips.
The chip also features 512KB of secondary cache, a reservoir of memory located
near the processor for rapid data access, more than most Pentium III-based
Xeons.
The commercial picture So who will buy Prestonia systems? Computer executives
and customers have generally spoken positively about the prospects for servers
incorporating the Pentium 4 Xeons. Historically, Xeon-based servers have been
relatively inexpensive compared with RISC-Unix servers. The 2.2GHz chip sells
for $615, while the 2GHz sells for $417 and the 1.8GHz goes for $251.
To some degree, the Xeon line has also slightly dimmed the appeal of
Itanium-based servers, which have commercially made only a marginal impact so
far.
"You've got really good Xeon-class products," McCarron said. "If they weren't
there, Intel would probably sell more Itaniums."
While Intel will continue to upgrade the Xeon line, new chips won't be
introduced as fast as desktop chips. The server market doesn't require as
rapid an upgrade cycle. Intel will release a new Xeon for one- and
two-processor servers every three to six months, Hambrick said, while
processors for servers with four or more processors will come out every nine
to 12 months.
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