IBM blade server redesign for 2006

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Paxville will damage IBM's credibility

When compared to contemporary Opterons, the "Paxville" Xeon posts the highest numbers on only one benchmark: the power consumption one. As tested by GamePC, Intel's latest consumes roughly 400 watts of power at idle, and pushes nearly 430 watts at full load. The numbers are so horribly out of whack that the fastest Opteron--the 2.4GHz Opteron 280--consumes 56% less power than the slowest Xeon. Heat output for the Xeon is rated at a peak of 150 watts, well in excess of the sub-100 watt TDP designs of the Opteron dual-core chips.

This voracious appetite for power and prodigious production of heat would be excusable in a high-performance environment if it outperformed the Opteron competition, but that appears to be the main thing the Xeon cannot do. After testing the Xeon and Opteron with SiSoft Sandra 2005, 3D Studio Max 7.0, Maya 6.5, WME 9.0, LAME MT, Apache Bench, and ScienceMark 2.0, the results showed that the Xeon was soundly defeated in every single benchmark. In some cases, the margin of Opteron victory was double the score of the Xeon.....

As a further downside, the dual-core Xeons will not work with any existing Socket-604 motherboard, meaning customers with existing Xeon investments must start from scratch.

Dell has announced it has full confidence in this new Xeon and is shipping servers based on it immediately.

http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2005Oct/gee20051021032863.htm

ERIC'S OPINION
This might be humorous if it weren't so pathetic. Is this latest Xeon the fastest thing yet to come out of Intel? Absolutely. As the GamePC article diplomatically tries to point out, this is a great performing chip ... for an Intel chip.

But the AMD Opteron doesn't merely defeat this new Xeon, it positively embarasses it. Seldom have I seen benchmarks where a new Intel product is so drastically humbled, but this is one of those times.

If I had to hazard a guess as to why these new Xeons are doing so poorly, I'd have to say it's the shared-bus architecture strangling the cores in a way that even 4 MB of L2 cache can't offset. This, of course, further highlights why AMD's HyperTransport bus architecture was one of the wisest moves the company could have made.

The power consumption figures for Paxville are absolutely stunning to behold, and I can only imagine how difficult it must be to control these beasts thermally and electrically. You can forget about seeing these in blade servers, that's for sure. Existing rackmount enclosures are almost certainly going to have to be completely redesigned to hold larger, more powerful power supplies and faster, noisier fans in order to try and keep these things fed and cool. As if we needed more gluttonous servers and more fan noise in our lives.

It goes without saying that Dell's insistence on sticking to an Intel-only strategy has gone from looking just plain dumb to patently absurd when viewed in the light of this latest product release from Intel. You can buy the fastest, most expensive dual-core Xeon from Dell and not only will it be a bear to set up and maintain, it will cost more and do less than dual-core offerings from folks like HP, IBM, and especially Sun.

You can be sure that my company--like many others that we consult for--is actively looking at Opteron solutions instead of Xeon ones for all our future purchases.

Posted by: sharikou   Posted on: 10/21/05 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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