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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
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
I'm sure some Sun engineers would disagree.
...if they weren't busy looking for a new job.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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...
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.