Intel Previews Nehalem-EX, Plans To Ship Late '09

Intel on Tuesday previewed its new Nehalem-EX Xeon 7400 processor as server partner IBM demonstrated a 128-thread server based on the new chip.

The preview comes less than two months after Intel released its Nehalem Xeon 5500 processor. Server vendors, including Apple, Dell, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, SGI and Sun, have since introduced servers featuring the new processor.

The Nehalem-EX preview comes shortly after Intel archrival Advanced Micro Devices said it is moving the release of its six-core Opteron processor up to this month, with servers based on the processor expected to ship next month.

Intel's new Nehalem-EX processor, expected to go into production later this year, will offer up to eight cores inside a single chip, supporting 16 threads with Intel's Hyper-threading technology, as well as 24 MB of cache.

That kind of performance will help develop the market for larger, higher-end servers, said Kennedy Brown, Xeon MP product manager at Intel, speaking on a video hosted on Intel's Web site.

"All of the goodness you saw launched with the Nehalem Xeon 5500 in the [energy] efficient performance [server] segment will be coming to the expandable segment, which is the higher-end segment that is based on servers with four sockets and above and with lots of memory," Brown said.

The capacities of the Nehalem-EX offer tremendous performance for four-socket servers, Brown said.

"And you'll also see more higher-end systems from OEMs based on eight sockets or above showing servers with 128 threads running," he said.

One of those OEMs, IBM, used that same video to talk briefly about its plans to build servers based on the Nehalem-EX processor.

Kevin Powell, worldwide product manager for IBM's high-end, Intel-based rack servers, demonstrated a Nehalem-EX-based server running 128 threads, and called it the "fastest-performing server in the world."

That server is expected to ship in early 2010, Powell said.

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