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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Paul Engel who wrote (71752)	1/21/1999 1:38:00 AM
From: Paul Engel	Respond to of 186894

Intel Investors - Intel's Focused on The EnterPrise Here's a good article on Intel's Xeon, a huge Sequent "SuperServer" using 64 of them, and the upcoming Pentium III/Pentium III Xeon CPUs. This represents the high end in profits AND market growth rate for Intel in the present and future. Note that the Sequent Machine with Xeons outperformed Compaq/DEC's Alpha Servers ! Paul {===================================} zdnet.com Intel is keeping its eyes on the enterprise By John Taschek Intel has long boasted that it has what it takes to run an enterprise, and now the company is starting to deliver the goods. Consider that last month Intel processors were at the heart of the fastest single system ever recorded. A Xeon-powered system achieved a Transaction Processing Performance Council TPC-C score of 93,900--less than 10 percent shy of the record performance of Compaq's AlphaServer, which had significantly more processors and was running in an eight-way cluster. This wasn't your everyday Xeon box, though. I suspect that Intel doesn't want you to know that the Sequent NUMA-Q 2000 tested costs well over $12 million and won't be available until midyear. The system also didn't have the eight-way Profusion architecture that Intel bought from Corollary--that's coming in the spring. This system had 64 Xeons, 64GB of RAM, 1,300 disk drives and 15 network cards. This same system also hit new highs on the TPC-D benchmark, which tests decision support. The NUMA-Q 2000 took top honors in the power test portion of the 1-terabyte workload test, which measures raw single-user performance. Interestingly, though, it was only middling in the multiuser throughput test. Regardless of the sheer hyperbole, the NUMA-Q 2000 does show that the Xeon is becoming a legitimate enterprise processor. Not only does it dominate every price/ performance benchmark, it's hitting the top of the charts on pure performance. The Xeon is closing in on the top contenders, but it's not there yet. Just because it's hitting high scores with a steroidal Sequent system doesn't mean that the average Xeon system is outperforming the average Alpha system. Eventually it will, though, and probably for less money. One way that Intel will begin to master the enterprise is by locking in software developers. The company captured a big portion of the desktop market with its MMX technology, which sped up some specific parts of software applications. But MMX only helped the desktop market, and to me, it didn't help all that much. Intel is really targeting the enterprise market with the new Pentium III processors, formerly code-named Katmai, which come with Streaming SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) extensions. The 70 new extensions are aimed squarely at boosting the speed of enterprise-level applications. Streaming SIMD will boost performance in two ways. First, it will speed up TCP/IP-- a lot. Web servers, load balancing and NOSes should get performance boosts of between 5 percent and 10 percent. Streaming SIMD will also help large-memory applications. For example, very large databases and ERP applications will get an additional 5 percent boost from a new module, called cacheability control. Intel is also taking aim at media markets. A new extension called the SIMD-FP should boost the performance of streaming media, general compression algorithms and the like. The difficulty with these benefits is twofold. First, there must be operating system support; currently there's none. We can assume that there will be drivers available for Solaris, Linux, Windows NT and SCO after the chips are announced. The other consideration is more bothersome. MMX, to me, stood for "massive marketing extravaganza." I have to wonder if SIMD will follow the same lines. Although I think SIMD will provide some performance boosts, I'm not sure how far it goes beyond the claims of the Intel marketing machine. In a way, I don't really think it matters. The Xeon and its next two versions--the Pentium III and the Pentium III Xeon, which are due this quarter and next quarter, respectively--will make a killing because they provide the right price to satisfy volume buyers. Are you ready to trust Intel in your mission-critical systems? John Taschek can be reached at john_taschek@zd.com.