Methinks a certain aluminium workstations
with a piece of fruit on the side will be getting a discreet bump later today
The first volley in the volume x64 server price war was officially fired today, with Intel rolling out its "Westmere-EP" Xeon 5600 processor. Rival Advanced Micro Devices is widely expected to counter with its "Magny-Cours" Opteron 6100 processors on March 29, to be followed by the long-awaited launch of Intel's "Nehalem-EX" …
That's clearly a chip design intended to be leveraged for more than 6 cores. I can easily see an extension to a 12 core architecture, and 8 cores is also an easy architecture, and 16 is not big leap from there, though i don't see how to go to more than 16 cores with this design, so i think AMD still has some tricks I haven't seen.
Before you get to excited.
Note tha if you compare the fujitsu SAP 2 Tier benchmark that was released today.
to the somewhat older Nehalem 4core/chip 45nm result, also from Fujitsu
http://download.sap.com/download.epd?context=B7691794A7D3E1206DE529D26FB3A5516451FDE4110D09EF86B25ABB420A6F90E95CF0662FC2C37C00BDDC6ECBF8B20B
Then you actually have:
1x5 times the cores.
1.83 times the Memory.
1.14 times the GHz
and only
1.46 times the Users.
416 users per core for Nehalem
405 users per core for Westmere
142 users per core per GHz for Nehalem
122 users per core per GHz for Westmere.
Sooooo....
" I can easily see an extension to a 12 core architecture, and 8 cores is also an easy architecture," Not without a different cooling solution, or a serious cut in GHz. You forget that Westmere is a 130Watt TDP.
// Jesper
Ouch that was bad!
It is almost as bad as IBM did
http://www.c0t0d0s0.org/archives/5941-The-new-TPC-H-benchmark-from-IBM.html
"Almost 4 years ago IBM published a result of the p5-595. This system yielded with 1.9 Ghz Power5 CPU 100,512.30 QphH. 4 years of development, 256 GByte more memory and 2.6 times the frequency gives you just roundabout 50% more performance"