Choosing Chips

Don't just trust in clock speed and raw horsepower to make processor and system sales. If there's ever been a time to take a deep dive into the value gains to be found in things like scalability and power efficiency, it's right now.

Here's a look at the silicon products from top vendors that VARs say are delivering the right bang for the buck.

Server/Workstation
Quad-core server processors remain the gold standard for OEMs and system builders, particularly with virtualization practices growing in the data centers they provision. Intel's quad-core Xeons have the lion's share of the market and the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant in late March released two new low-voltage, quad-core Xeons that should be pretty popular—the L5400 series, which comes in 2.33-GHz and 2.50-GHz flavors, both of which sit in a 50W thermal envelope. And Intel says it will also ship a 40W, 3.0-GHz dual-core Xeon sometime in the second quarter.

Where to put those juicy new dual- and quad-cores? Builders, integrators and solution providers serving the SMB market might want to get to know Intel's new set of modular server building blocks, code-named Clear Bay, launched in mid-January. The Clear Bay building blocks, which come with a built-in management console, can support up to six server compute nodes and 14 serial-attached SCSI 2.5-inch hard disk drives. Clear Bay also has two Ethernet switch modules and virtual storage mapping.

CRN's Test Center calls Clear Bay "an all-in-one, top-to-bottom, rackable system that provides bladelike horsepower in an easy-to-deploy, easy-to-manage package."

Intel's long-awaited modular server has system builders and other channel partners licking their chops at the prospect of wrapping the ultra-scalable product with services for small- to midsize business customers.

Clear Bay should find its "sweet spot" with SMBs looking for enterprise-class IT solutions, said David D'Agostino, vice president of operations at Victor, N.Y.-based Brite Computers.

"I think there's no question that there's a sweet spot in the SMB space, basically anyone with 10 to 25 users. The customer is able to scale this as the company grows, so it's basically a business-in-a-box. You can continuously increase modules," D'Agostino said.

Meanwhile, Advanced Micro Devices Inc. is shipping quad-core Opterons in volume following a fix of the glitch that hampered the ramp of the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based chip maker's latest server chips late last year and the first quarter of 2008.

OEMs and system builders will have quad-core Opteron systems raring to go in April, and that's not a moment too soon for struggling AMD. Sun Microsystems Inc. announced the first such server, with Hewlett-Packard Corp. following close behind with its $17,000 ProLiant DL785 G5, built on four 2.2-GHz Opteron quad-cores with 8 Gbytes of memory.

But will four cores from AMD be enough to hang tough with rival Intel? Watch out as the chip leader takes the dust covers off a six-core server processor code-named Dunnington, which Intel Digital Enterprise Group GM Pat Gelsinger has promised to start shipping in the second half of the year.

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