Intel launches Caneland MP platform and Tigerton CPUs
Intel has announced the launch of the "Caneland" 7300 series MP (multi-processor) 4-socket chipset and the Tigerton XEON MP 65nm CPU. The clock speeds for the new chip are 1.6, 1.86, 2.40, and 2.93 gigahertz and they are based on Intel's Core Micro-architecture which launched last summer with the Core 2 Duo desktop and Xeon 5100 series dual processor server platform. The 50 watt version goes up to 1.86 GHz, 80 watt up to 2.40 GHz, and the 2.93 GHz Tigerton CPU peaks out at 130 TDP (Thermal Design Power). [Update 9/6/2007 - See Intel Tigerton and AMD Barcelona price list and Sun packs big bang in tiny 2U Intel 7300 16-core server]
Multiple speed records in the 4-socket x86/x64 market were broken. IBM's System x3850 M2 is based on IBM's own X4 DDR2 chipset came in with a record SPECint_rate_base2006 score of 184. All the other servers announced today were based on the announced Intel 7300 chipset. The Lenovo R630 G7 came in second at 178 SPECint_rate_base2006 and a peak SPECint_rate2006 score of 214. By contrast, the highest performing AMD 4-socket server using the AMD Opteron 8222 dual-core CPU comes in at 96.1 base and 108 peak for SPEC CPU 2006. AMD will launch their quad-core processors later this month at 2.0 GHz which will reduce the 91% base performance advantage in SPEC CPU 2006 that Intel opened up. More benchmarks on other SPEC metrics, SAP, TPC can be seen in Intel's press release below.
The IBM's System x3850 uses IBM's own X4 chipset which greatly differs from the Intel Caneland chipset because it uses DDR2 memory instead of FBDIMM (Fully Buffered DIMM). DDR2 requires massive pin count and it is expensive to implement on the motherboard, but it has significant power savings over FBDIMM. The X4 architecture uses "re-drive" chips to boost the distance between the memory and the X4 memory controller. Each M2 Server holds 4 CPUs and 32 DIMMs and four of these servers can be linked together through a proprietary interface to create a massive 16-processor 128-DIMM server. Each re-drive chip takes 7 watts and there is one re-drive chip per 4 DIMMs taking a total of 56 watts. [UPDATE 9/8/2007 - However, those 56 watts are offset by a potential savings of 256 192 watts saved from using 32 DDR2 DIMMs which results in a net savings of 136 watts. However, it isn't clear how much extra power the X4 chipset itself uses but IBM reps told me that the memory subsystem uses 25% less power than an Intel 7300 series chipset so the total system savings would be significantly less than 25%] See a gallery of the IBM X385 M2.