Battle Royal Brews In Workstation Silicon
(04/25/98; 12:06 p.m. ET)
By Alexander Wolfe, EE Times
An engineering-workstation battle royal is in
the offing as Intel, Sun and IBM get ready
to field powerful new technologies. Intel is
poised to launch Xeon, a beefed-up Pentium
II-class processor, aiming the CPU and
board-level reference designs at workstation
OEMs. IBM is prepping the first systems to
feature its new Power3 RISC architecture.
And Sun next month will unveil enhanced
Ultrasparc IIi models, while readying future
systems built around its next-generation
Ultrasparc III chip.
The coming conflict marks a major attempt
by Intel Corp. [INTC] to position itself
squarely in the center of a fertile
workstation market that promises huge
growth and ample profit margins - two
factors that are decidedly elusive in the
doldrums of today's desktop
personal-computer market.
For its part, Sun Microsystems Inc.
[SUNW] is drawing a line in the sand,
putting the Wintel world on notice that it will
aggressively defend its Sparc architecture
into the upper reaches of the workstation
and server markets. At IBM Corp. [IBM],
the decision to equip workstations with a
new generation of PowerPC technology
telegraphs the company's belief that there
are applications - for example, high-end
EDA simulation - in which Windows NT
doesn't cut it.
As the offerings from Intel (company
profile), Sun (company profile) and IBM
(company profile) hit the market over the
next several months, the result could be the
biggest architectural conflict yet between
proponents of Wintel and those backing
RISC.
"Xeon is a tremendous performance push
for Intel, taking them nicely into the
midrange of the workstation market," said
Jay Moore, senior analyst at the Aberdeen
Group (Boston). "At the same time, the
efforts that Sun and IBM are putting into
place will stave off Intel from the high end.
For Intel, IA-64 and Merced will be the
turnaround point in terms of competing
effectively in the high-end workstation
market." (Merced is Intel's upcoming 64-bit
microprocessor, due for release in late
1999.)
Chips and boards
Intel's immediate thrust revolves around
Xeon and a companion multiprocessing
workstation platform. Xeon, which will
come in a Slot 2 cartridge containing six
separate dice, will be formally unveiled in
June or July and will ship in the second half
of the year, Intel officials said. The
processor will incorporate a large L2 cache
as well as support for multiprocessing and
scalable I/O. Xeon also boasts a backside
bus that can transfer 2 Gbytes/s of data at
400 MHz. Along with the CPU, Intel will
sell Xeon-equipped motherboards to OEMs.
Equally significant is that Intel is making
available to OEMs a reference design for a
complete multiprocessing workstation
platform based on Xeon. There are two
messages behind that move, industry
observers said.
For one, it hammers home the reality that
it's getting tougher for plain-vanilla OEMs
with tiny engineering departments to handle
all aspects of design for a heavy-duty
platform. That's amply evident in the
enhanced thermal and electrical design specs
Intel has folded into the reference platform.
Those include elements such as more
pull-up resistors, additional damping
capacitors and enhanced pathways for
cooling.
In addition, some observers note that design
tolerances are getting tighter as CPU and
bus frequencies rise. That means that getting
the processor, core logic, DRAM and buses
to work together is an engineering challenge,
and some OEMs will welcome Intel's
assistance.
Nowhere are these heightened engineering
considerations more evident than with
buses. Xeon workstations will include Intel's
new 450NX core-logic chip set, which
supports a 100-MHz front-side bus enabling
transfers of 800 Mbytes/second. Data
traverses the bus on both edges of the clock
pulse, an increasingly common technique
that effectively doubles bus speed but
requires far more attention to ringing and
signal-integrity issues.
Along with workstations, Xeon is aimed at
servers. According to John Miner, general
manager of the enterprise server group at
Intel, by the end of the year OEMs will be
shipping eight-way Xeon-based servers.
While Intel moves forward, Sun isn't sitting
idly by. In a few weeks, Sun is due to
buttress its Darwin line of workstations with
additional family members, including a
powerful high-end system. The boxes are
based on the UltraSparc IIi. (In addition,
Sun will soon unveil a heavy-duty enterprise
server.)
"We are planning to come out with
architectures that scale to a very large
number of processors," said Ken Okin,
general manager of the workstation products
group at Sun. "We will use that to compete
with Merced."
However, Sun's most critical attempt to beat
back the Intel tide revolves around
workstations now in development based on
its Ultrasparc III processor, which will
sample this summer, reportedly in speed
grades of 600 MHz. (The workstations
themselves aren't expected to be announced
until late this year.)
Sun's Sparc-only strategy is all the more
notable because it makes the company the
only vendor exclusively committed to a
non-Intel processor architecture. IBM and
Hewlett-Packard Co., which at one time
were RISC-only vendors with their
respective Power and PA-RISC
architectures, today make Wintel
workstations in addition to their Unix
offerings.
Okin insisted that Sun will remain firmly in
the Sparc camp, despite the recent
revelation that two of its OEMs - NCR
Corp. and Fujitsu Ltd. - will port Sun's
Solaris operating system onto Intel's Merced
processor.
"Sun will continue to sell Sparc silicon,"
Okin said. "Sun is planted firmly behind
Sparc and the Solaris operating system,
which will take us into the next century.
We're also working on the Ultrasparc IV
processors, and we believe we'll be able to
outperform the Wintel competition."
Some industry analysts see that as a viable
strategy. "Sun is going to continue to ratchet
up the speed of their processors," said Bob
Sakakeeny, analyst at the Aberdeen Group.
"There's years of life left in the
architecture."
In its marketing pitches, Sun likes to
emphasize the impressive floating-point
performance of Ultrasparc. However, as in
the Intel world, bus performance has
become just as much a battlefield as CPU
speed. Sun equips many of its workstations
with the PCI bus, so that resellers and users
can easily add commodity peripherals into
the system.
For the central pathway in its high-end
workstations and servers, Sun is eschewing
a traditional bus in favor of point-to-point
crossbar-switch technology. "The crossbars
allow multiple transfers between
independent nodes, compared with a bus,
which can only broadcast from one node to
any other node at a time," explained Okin.
"You need this kind of power when you're
cranking up large simulations - for example,
a large Verilog model."
The crossbar, which Sun is calling its
UltraPort Architecture, handles
processor-to-memory, processor-to-graphics
and processor-to-I/O transfers.
Big Blue Power
Not content to sit on the sidelines, IBM is
well into an effort to engineer a family of
workstations built around its new Power3
processor. Formerly known as the 630, the
Power3 is upwardly compatible with both
PowerPC and Power2 architectures. It
incorporates multiple dispatch units and
multiple caches, and it boasts low memory
latency.
"Power3 brings 64-bit capability and
supports huge memory structures," said
Tom Arthur, IBM's RS/6000 workstation
brand manager. "It will be coupled with fast
memory controllers and the flexibility to
have multiple buses and fully
symmetric-multiprocessing systems."
The Power3-based Unix workstations will
be released later this year, Arthur said.
For IBM's engineers, the biggest challenge
in designing the systems has been deciding
how to differentiate them from the
competition while keeping costs down,
compared both with other Unix boxes and
with the increasingly attractive Windows NT
systems. Increasingly, the solution has been
to use commodity devices in some
subsystems so that engineering dollars can
be aimed where they'll have the biggest
impact.
"We're using commodity technologies in
memory modules, Ethernet LAN controllers
and SCSI II devices," Arthur said. "That lets
us focus our investments in the CPU and
the graphics subsystem. This way, you don't
blow your budget on stuff you can get off
the shelf."
Processor-to-memory bandwidth is also a
key focus, Arthur said, adding that much
attention is devoted to caches and to
memory controllers. For example, both the
instruction and data caches in the Power3,
though not particularly large, are 128-way
set-associative in a bid to reduce memory
latency in real-world usage. The Power3
also uses prefetch instructions, so that apps
can queue up required information into the
CPU's L1 caches.
On the marketing front, IBM must grapple
with an issue that Intel and Sun - each with
its own single-architecture strategy - don't
face. IBM has a foot in two worlds. Along
with its Unix systems, IBM is a major
player in the design and sales of Intel-based
workstations. As a result, the company
sometimes appears to walk a fine line in
terms of marketing. "There will be a time
period where there will be coexistence
between Unix and NT," Arthur said.
For now, IBM appears to be positioning its
Windows NT boxes as solutions for lower-
to midrange applications. "But if you're
doing logic simulation or fault analysis that's
very compute-intensive, those apps will
continue to be dominated by Unix
workstations," Arthur said, "because they
give the best bang for the buck."
In its own forward-looking marketing move,
Sun has streamlined its corporate structure,
turning its previously independent business
units into seven divisions reporting to chief
operating officer Ed Zander. Workstations
and servers, which were handled by Sun
Microsystems Computer Co., will be
developed and sold by Sun's new
computer-systems division. SMCC president
Masood Jabbar will head the division. |
