8-Core Intel Nehalem-EX To Launch This Month

MojoKid writes "What could you do with 8 physical cores of CPU processing power? Intel's upcoming 8-core Nehalem-EX is launching later this month, according to Intel Xeon Platform Director Shannon Poulin. The announcement puts to rest rumors that the 8-core part might be delayed, and makes good on a promise Intel made last year when the chip maker said it would release the chip in the first half of 2010. To quickly recap, Nehalem-EX boasts an extensive feature-set, including up to 8 cores per processor, up to 16 threads per processor with Intel Hyper-threading, scalability up to eight sockets via Intel's serial Quick Path Interconnect and more with third-party node controllers, and 24MB of shared cache."

Comments

Re:Balance

[DarkOx]

These are target it the Virtualization and specialized application space. You are not going to put these in your gaming rig, and your not going to use the +4 core models in your tranditional stand alone application server. You could get much better dollar to performance ration elsewhere if those are your intended applications.

Now slapping two or more of these things on a Linux box with a ton of UMLs running or on VMware ESX, and loading the system up with 128 gigs of ram and a medium business can probalby run their entire datacenter on 2 boxen + an entry level SAN.

IBM Power7 also has 8 cores

[karvind]

If it is matter of core-war, IBM's latest Power7 also has 8 cores. It is actually based on 45nm technology compared to Intel's latest 32nm. What makes Power7 exciting is that it has on-die 32MB L3 cache. They achieved this by introducing eDRAM (embedded DRAM) in the technology. Both Nehalem-EX and Power7 are targeting low-end server market, so it should be interesting battle.

http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/09/ibms-8-core-power7-twice-the-muscle-half-the-transistors.ars

AMD's competitor, Socket G32

[yuhong]

In other news, AMD has a blog article on it's soon to be launched competitor to this, Socket G32 8-core/12-core Opterons:
http://blogs.amd.com/work/2010/02/22/magny-cours-is-right-on-schedule-and-shipping-to-customers/

Re:Actually...

[vertinox]

It will improve gaming performance if you happened to be running something like Quakes Wars in ray tracing.

Intel put together a demo on a workstation system with two Nehalem quad-core CPUs getting about 15 - 20 fps.

Since ray tracing is embarrassingly parallel, all one needs to do to improve performance is to throw more cores at it.

Keep in mind ray tracing is much more cpu intensive than gpu intensive...