8-Core Dual Xeon "V8" Test Rig Performance

MojoKid writes "Back in January at this year's CES show, Intel was giving the press glimpses of a rig in their booth dubbed the V8. It was essentially a dual-socket workstation platform outfitted with a pair of quad-core Xeon processors for a total of eight cores — hence the "V8". The enterprise platform that this box was built around is based on Intel's 5000X chipset, aka Blackford, and it supports up to 32GB of FBDIMM serial memory. HotHardware has a component build-up of a more current Intel V8 machine here, with preliminary benchmarks, pictures and more details on this 8-core dual Xeon powerhouse."

Comments

Obligatory

[Pojut]

Imagine a beowolf clu-

oh, sod it.

Re:FB-DIMMS suck for gameing

[drrck]

This machine is obviously not designed for gaming. 8 Cores sound to me like a big number crunching machine for simulations and the like.

So what're they gonna price 'em at?

[Penguinisto]

I realize that it ain't exactly enterprise-grade server type stuff (no dual power supplies, dedicated SCSI/SAS hot-swap backplane, etc etc), but an 8-core Mac with lots o' RAM and a ton of HDD space RAIDed out a bit is likely to be way cheaper than what the likes of HP and Dell are gonna charge for this sucker once they spec a rackmount box to wrap around it (I wonder how this critter and the 8-core Mac stack up against each other, anyway?)

But then, who knows? Maybe the SME market might put some pressure on Dell and HP, pointing at the Mac while doing it. (I know, I know... but seriously - rEFIt for booting, a solid Linux distro like CentOS, and a couple of PCI-X cards, and you've got a full on server for most small/medium biz needs. Chuck in AppleCare for (most) warranty stuff, and a small business can do the same computing horsepower for a whole hell of a lot less than they otherwise could afford, IIRC).

/P

Re:So what're they gonna price 'em at?

[Jeff DeMaagd]

Mac Pro doesn't support PCI-X cards, only PCIe. This is one downside compared to the Dell 690, which is one of the closest analogues in the Dell line. The 690 supports PCIe and PCIx.

I suppose for the price difference, you might be able to afford to replace even some of the very expensive PCI-X cards you might hypothetically have and might still be less than a 690 with thee most similar specs. One thing I do like about non-Apple workstations is that you can buy with one socket populated now, and buy the second CPU & heat sink later when the chip gets cheaper and when more of your software supports more cores. With Apple, all systems are sold with both sockets populated, so the original purchase is a little more prohibitive, and any later upgrades are harder to justify.

So it's a Mac Pro?

[ZachPruckowski]

Sounds a lot like a high-end Mac Pro (shipping for months) with a nicer graphics card. Dell Precision 690s are a bit pricier, but they do the same thing (admittedly, I envy the SAS built-in). I assume HP has a similar model, but I didn't check.

How is this news? Intel attached a marketing name to a product that has existed for months and is the logical extension of having dual-socket boards and quad-core chips. I mean, it's basically (2*2)*2 - dual-core processors (2) on MCM (*2) in a two-socket (*2) board. There's exactly no advancement going on here.

horray

[jswigart]

One step closer to running Vista! Baby steps.

Re:FB-DIMMS suck for gameing

[gormanly]

Except the shared bus the Xeons sit on is a seriously limiting factor, no-one in HPC is using Xeons because of it.

A better bet would be a Sun Fire X4600 type of machine, 8 dual-core Opterons and 128GB of memory in a 4U server chassis.

This is well known, and having played with one, it's a very nice machine. Unlike its 24TB cousin ...