8-Core Intel Nehalem-EX To Launch This Month 186
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."
Re:It's obvious (Score:3, Informative)
This processor is meant for servers, because they're Xeon, and with all the Web 2.0 and Cloud computing going on, servers are always hungry for more power.
Sun Ultrasparc T2 has 8 cores... and 64 threads (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T2/ [sun.com]
And the future Ultrasparc T3 will have 16 cores and 8 threads per core for a total of 128 threads per chip
http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2010/02/two-billion-transistor-beasts-power7-and-niagara-3.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss [arstechnica.com]
No benefit? (Score:3, Informative)
It should also be noted that the applications that benefit are ones that would generally be used in Xeon (server and workstation) machines. Further, most of the applications that failed to benefit from hyperthreading are not written to take advantage of many (more than one or two) cores. As applications are updated for "many core" systems, it is likely that the benefit from hyperthreading will become more significant.
In any case, it is far from "established" that hyperthreading has "no benefit."
Re:Hyperthreading (Score:5, Informative)
Hyperthreading used to suck, but it works pretty well now. In the benchmarks I've done with my code I see about a 60% speedup.
http://www.vips.ecs.soton.ac.uk/index.php?title=Benchmarks#Results_summary [soton.ac.uk]
Re:Balance (Score:1, Informative)
I'll give you that you could probably virtualise a hell of a lot of stuff on top of two of these boxes in an ESX cluster (although you'd have no redundancy) but one SAN? You wouldn't have the IOPS.
Sorry, I'm being a pedant...
Re:Balance (Score:1, Informative)
Hate to tell you this, but Xen development is pretty much over. It's KVM, Virtualbox or VMWare from here on out.
Re:programs compatible with 8 cores (Score:3, Informative)
Not with an X25-E.