Slashdot Mirror
Intel Unveils 10-Core Xeon Processors
MojoKid writes "Intel announced its new E-series of Xeon processors today, claiming that they will deliver nearly unparalleled advances in CPU performance and power efficiency. It has been just over a year since Santa Clara released its Nehalem-based octal-core Beckton processors. Whereas Beckton was focused entirely on performance and architectural efficiency, these new Xeons are more balanced. The new chips boost the core count to ten (up to 20 threads with HT enabled) and will be offered at a wide range of power envelopes. The new E7 series incorporates the benefits of the Sandy Bridge architecture, its support for new security processing instructions, and its improved power management technology. Intel has also baked in support for low-voltage DIMMs, which allows vendors to opt for 1.35v products."
claiming that they will deliver nearly unparalleled advances in CPU performance
What's the point of having 10 cores then ?
130W TDB at 2.4 GHz, on the high end. Sadly, that information wasn't in the posted article. http://news.softpedia.com/news/More-Details-About-Intel-s-Upcoming-Xeon-E7-8800-CPU-Line-Emerge-183270.shtml
Surely they will be *more* paralleled than any processor before them :-D
That's almost impressive.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Absolutely no doubout E-series of Xeon processors today will be hot one http://maxwd.com/
Antony http://maxwd.com/s
I've got a SB desktop computer and it just screams. they made some sizable per-clock performance improvements. Also AES-NI is no joke. I am pretty amazed by the speed. Tryecrypt supports it and the benchmark difference is huge. With a 100MB buffer a pure software AES implementation benches at 649MB/sec on my system (553MB/sec for Twofish, 254MB/sec for Serpent). Same test with AES-NI on, 2.7GB/sec. That is 4.2x the speed.
Could be really useful for web servers, particularly if you are looking at going all SSL all the time.
This is what the craze of liquid cooling systems was all about. Time to buy a large radiator.
Even I've got a machine with four of those in it and I waited about a year for the price to go down.
processor : 47 vendor_id : AuthenticAMD cpu family : 16 model : 9 model name : AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 6174 stepping : 1 cpu MHz : 2200.000 cache size : 512 KB physical id : 4 siblings : 12 core id : 5 cpu cores : 12 apicid : 75 fpu : yes fpu_exception : yes cpuid level : 5 wp : yes flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush mmx fxsr sse sse2 ht syscall nx mmxext fxsr_opt pdpe1gb rdtscp lm 3dnowext 3dnow constant_tsc nonstop_tsc pni cx16 popcnt lahf_lm cmp_legacy svm extapic cr8_legacy altmovcr8 abm sse4a misalignsse 3dnowprefetch osvw bogomips : 4399.82 TLB size : 1024 4K pages clflush size : 64 cache_alignment : 64 address sizes : 48 bits physical, 48 bits virtual power management: ts ttp tm stc 100mhzsteps hwpstate [8]
The new E7 series incorporates the benefits of Sandy Bridge
is a bit misleading, i think.
As far as i understood it uses the older Westmere EX architecture. So while it may have added instructions also available in the Sandy Bridge architecture, clock for clock it will likely be slower in most cases and probably won't reach the the clock speeds of Sandy Bridge based chips.
Yeah that line of tin foil hats you have were in use 200 years ago.
Hopefully Bulldozer will fix it but right now, they don't do so well. Have a look at this HardOCP article on the new SB processors (http://www.hardocp.com/article/2011/01/03/intel_sandy_bridge_2600k_2500k_processors_review/3). They tossed in a high end 6 core AMD CPU too. It just gets killed. In many tests, it is below the older 4 core i7 CPUs, in pretty much all of them it is below the 4 core SBs and I don't see a one that it beats the 6 core i7 (the 980X).
AMD offers more cores, but their cores don't do as much. Don't buy in to core hype any more than MHz hype or anything else. More is not automatically better. Have to run benchmarks on it and see how it actually does.
Like I said, hopefully Bulldozer will change that. Hopefully it'll be competitive with Intel per core, per clock and so on. However right now Intel processors just kill.
"...they will deliver nearly unparalleled advances in CPU performance..."
Good to hear. Hopefully the next iteration will be fully unparalled. Much easier to program for a single core.
Am I the only person who initially read that as "It has been just over a year since Santa Claus released its Nehalem-based..."?
just metaphorically as yet. they are still being built. the greatest story ever to be untold? tag team interviews from real people, guaranteed to generate facial expression images that are hard to focus on, yet impossible to forget?
so far, all of the highly eligible contestants have the same reply; 'we're not going in the cage, plus we still want to kill you, & almost everybody else'. so we'll see?
1 core, 2 core, 4 core, 8 core, 16 core, 64 core, 128 core, 256 core, 512 core, 1024 core, 2048 core, 4096 core, 8192 core......
Have a read of what the NSA had in the 1950's and 60's at: Read up on ATLAS, ABEL http://www.governmentattic.org/3docs/NSA-HGPEDC_1964.pdf
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Hardware accelerated SSH
Hardware accelerated LZMA
Thats about it.
HTTP/1.1 400
Still... looks to far away from SPARC's 128 threads.
Just to be clear, that means 50MHz when compared to a modern i7.
Courtesy of the D-Generation.
Nasa put men on the moon in the 60's so does that mean we should all be going on holiday (vacation) to the moon? Some technologies don't scale or are too expensive to mass produce.
Though these do not seem to have all the Sandy Bridge technologies. In particular, AVX isn't listed. Thus is does not seem to have new SB instructions. Maybe they are talking about the improvements to the existing AES-NI instructions (SB is faster with those than older i7s) however it does not appear to have new extensions.
I don't know that AVX is of much use to servers, but it does mean this isn't SB architecture. Which means it is not as efficient per clock (SB made some good gains in that area, not that the original i7s aren't pretty efficient already). Also mean it probably doesn't have their new turbo boost tech. That isn't a huge deal, but is nice. It gives a wider range of boot options depending on how heavily cores are loaded.
On the older processors you find 1/1/1/2 is a common turbo boost spec. That means it can increase 100Mhz at most with 4, 3, or 2 cores loaded and 200MHz at most with 1 core loaded. For the SB processors it is 1/2/3/4. It's a bigger deal for mobile, since they are clocked slower and have bigger turbo boost levels, but still nice for desktops and servers. Means if something hits a single core hard, you can get a non-trivial clock boost.
Does make it less of an interesting announcement. More cores is cool and all, but SB is neat because of the new architecture. Apparently that is still to come for servers.
very nice post.good information.
More info:- http://www.elantechnologies.com/services/web-apps
...a Beowulf cluster of these!
First, MHz is a meaningless metric when independent of instruction set. Second, how much do you think the NSA was willing to pay for their 600MHz? I was talking to some IBM guys a bit about some of their high-end machine a while ago, and wondering who was actually buying them. Their reply was that they weren't allowed to disclose their customers, but 'most of them had three letter initials'. These machines had 1TB of RAM and up, and a price tag where optional features were measured in increments of millions of dollars. Some of their customers, apparently, bought the top-of-the-line model.
So, if you want to be able to use the same sort of hardware as the NSA, I'm pretty sure IBM or SGI would be happy to sell it to you. You'll find the dollar price will be at least 8 digits, but I'm sure you're happy to pay that, rather than let the technologies be 'suppressed'.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Any CPU with where the number of cores is not a power of 2 makes me uncomfortable. Six cores, ten cores - it just feels wrong.
"high speed electronic static storage in the amount of 1,024 words. The word size was 36 bits instead of ATLAS I's 24, two address logic instead of one, more sophisticated instruction code, and the basis of all computing today, input-output program controlled instructions. Having two-address logic instead of one was very powerful for computers of this age. The new instruction codes included another first, a 'repeat' instruction, some arithmetic instructions, a scaling factor ability, and index jumping capability. " The NSA, then like now wanted to find data, numbers... then voices.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Octal is a numerical system: adj: "relating to or using a system of numerical notation that has 8 rather than 10 as a base."
and
noun:"the octal system; octal notation."
Perhaps they meant:
octo- (also oct- before a vowel)
combining form
eight; having eight
I think working in octal will give a huge performance boost as compared to working in BINARY.
One would think that would have been touted as a major feature as going from on/off to on/2/3/4/5/6/7/off states is a nice break-through.
Each octal-bit now can now store 256 states vs on/off previously. Instantly increases memory density, bandwidth on the bus etc.
Nah, that was probably 100 years ago courtesy of F. W. Woolworth. Before that everyone liked quality too much. Unhardened steel hats!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'm still quite content with my E5462-based 2008 model, thanks :)
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
just what we need a $2500-$3000 1 cpu system with a low-mid range video card and like 2GB ram at the base price.
I skimmed the document, I didn't see anything particularly exciting about ATLAS or ABEL. ABEL apparently had drum storage and core memory. There's no way any of the stuff in that document was running at 600MHz.
The Cray-1 ran at 100MHz and the NSA and national labs snatched them up. There would have been no market for the Cray if there were secret machines running at 600MHz.
I worked in supercomputing in the late 80's and early nineties. At that time it was still possible to assemble processors out of discrete components and outperform microprocessors. Relatively small teams could build really fast machines. By the mid nineties this was no longer possible. Today, the industrial base required to make a high performance processor is huge. The government can't have machines significantly faster than what's commercially available. There's not enough money in the black budget to fund it. That's why you see the Air Force making a supercomputer out of Playstations.
Could be really useful for web servers, particularly if you are looking at going all SSL all the time.
Sure, except you also have to worry about algorithms like RSA, DH, SHA1, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512, and providing a good source of random bits as well (hardware RNG).
That's one thing I like about Sun/Oracle's T-series chips: they have all the above algorithms. A ~4 year old T2 chip can do RC4 at 81 Gb/s, AES-128 at 44 Gb/s, and AES-256 at 31 Gb/s: that's enough to saturate 10 GigE connections (in both directions at times). SHA-256 at 41 Gb/s and RSA-2048 at 6400 op/s make for very fast web secure servers.
http://blogs.sun.com/sprack/entry/ultrasparc_t2_crypto_performance
http://blogs.sun.com/bmseer/entry/ultra_fast_cryptography_on_the
If companies web companies want to offer HTTPS, they just need to throw up a bunch of these as SSL proxies to feed back into your normal (Linux) app servers. Given that they run Unix (Solaris), you can probably leverage a configuration management system (e.g. Puppet) in a lot easier fashion than you could an appliance-based load balancer as well.
From one of the articles linked to in this thread: "Watts Consumed (lower is better)"
To me, that's not an unbiased opinion. I work for a power company, guys, and I don't like to see this slanderous talk on a website as prestigious as this one. Plus, it's still cold outside. I have the data to prove that my computer room is, on average, 10% warmer than the entire rest of my house - and it's on the bottom floor. I just want you all to remember that you can run your computer all day and it won't drive your gas bill up _one cent_
Seriously,
This shouldn't be modded -1. He's right. I can't click through links either (newest chrome). Shit's busted.
that goes to eleven?
Huh? Why are the core operating on octal? Does this new version run in decimal?
antipaucity
imagine a Beowulf cluster of those..
Will i have to send a small drilling robot to nuke the middle core if i need to reboot?
My cores go to 11. None. More. Parallel.
I can't wait to eat that monkey...
First glance at benchmarks indicates that this is still a bit slower than Power7, and has a similar or more expensive price. Considering we're a few months away from the Power7+ kicker, I don't expect this to have much adoption outside Windows Server users.
Not all tasks are of an equal load at all times. You can have situations where there is a strong load on less cores, and then later ones with a load on all cores. That's the reason for such a thing to exist.
Not only that but turbo boost doesn't just work with how many cores are loaded, it has to do with electrical load and thermal load as well, hence why it can be active even if all cores are loaded. So it allows for a chip to meet a given TDP, but then if cooling is good it can go faster, and scale back if not.
It's a useful technology that'll hopefully keep getting better. The more flexible the scaling, the more energy efficient CPUs can be when lightly loaded and the more powerful they can be when heavily loaded.
What happened to the 80 core universe that Intel promised years ago? That would be unparalleled for sure!
yes, it's very fast.... you can get information about this on http://www.sawanswers.com/search?q=process