Intel Gives 'Nehalem' Server Launch

Intel launched a version of its "Nehalem" processor architecture for servers on Monday, which it will market under the "Xeon 5500" name. All told, however, fifteen derivatives of the chip were announced.

According to Patrick Gelsinger, the senior vice president and general manager overseeing the Digital Enteprise Group at Intel, the introduction of the Xeon 5500 is the most important introduction of a server processor in over a decade, he said at a launch of the Xeon 5500 at Intel's headquarters here.

Intel has shipped hundreds of thousands of the new Intel Xeon 5500s since December, when it first began production. Although Intel said that more than 230 unique systems are shipping with the new chip inside, a collection of end-user customers gathered on stage, from Dreamworks to Humana, almost all said that they were still in testing or development.

The Nehalem architecture was already launched as part of the Core i7 product for PCs. Intel also announced the 5520 chipset and the Intel 85299 10-Gbit Ethernet controller, as well as the Intel Data Center Manager software. The latter product overlaps some of the services that OEMs themselves provide; for those that do not, however, the service allows an IT manager to cap the amount of energy a datacenter consumes. The software translates that control into throttling individual microprocessor cores.

Virtualization adds a new wrinkle, however, and the Xeon 5500 improves a whopping 160 percent over the older Xeon 5400 in the basic VMware benchmark, according to Gelsinger. That means that more and more applications can be virtualized instead of running directly on the hardware, as applications stored on the PC do. The advantage of virtualization is that the software doesn't directly interact with (or crash) the host server; the disadvantage is that translation comes at a performance hit.

In a telling demonstration, Intel showed off a pair of older "Woodcrest" servers, each pulling 7 amps or 800 watts while running at full capacity. In cooperation with Microsoft, Intel executed a live migration of both virtualized machines onto the Xeon 5500 box, which was able to process both virtualized environments while pulling 2.5 amps and less than 260 watts.

The Intel Xeon processor 5500 series – previously known as "Nehalem-EP" – ranges in price from $188 to $1,600 in quantities of 1,000, Intel said. The introduction also includes two processors specifically designed for the communications market, such as blades and rack-mounted systems. Those two chips, the L5518 and the L5508, run at 2.13 GHz and 2.00 GHz, respectively, consuming 60 and 38 watts.

About eight million servers currently use the Intel architecture, according to IDC. Intel's competition includes both the SPARC architecture developed by Sun, as well as the POWER architecture developed by IBM. Both IBM and Sun, however, were on hand to show off X86-based servers, and the rumored Sun-IBM merger talks would seem to imply that only one architecture would survive a merged company.

The Intel Xeon 5500 uses a 45-nm process and includes 730 million transistors. Next up for Intel is the Nehalem-EX, an eight-core version which will likely be announced at the Intel Developer Forum this fall.