Intel Out To Transform The World With Nehalem

Intel made its case for transforming the data center Monday, launching its Nehalem-class Xeon 5500 series of server chips with its entire ecosystem in tow at the chip maker's Santa Clara, Calif., campus. More than 70 vendors and white-box builders are ready with some 230 new products built around the benchmark-busting processor, leading Intel's Pat Gelsinger to call the first Nehalem DP server chips "a product we truly believe is transformational."

"This is the most important server launch we have done since the Pentium Pro," said Gelsinger, a senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprises Group. Under a Xeon-festooned backdrop promising an "Intelligent Choice" -- while "Smarter Choice" is newly available, that tagline probably wasn't given much thought at Intel headquarters -- Gelsinger sketched the broad details and put Nehalem through its paces for a pair of eye-opening power management and virtualization demos.

The upshot -- Intel is hitting the market with 17 new enterprise-class server/workstation processors based on its Nehalem microarchitecture, including 14 dual-core and quad-core chips in the Xeon 5500 series (formerly code-named Gainestown) ranging in price from $188 to $1,600 for 1,000-unit orders, and three in the Xeon 3500 series (formerly Bloomfield) available for $284, $562 and $999.

Gelsinger's comparison of the 5500 series to the success of 1995's Pentium Pro, Intel's first server workload-optimized chip, may be a case of the chip giant getting ahead of itself considering that these parts have been released for all of one day. On the other hand, the new device has already smashed 30 benchmarking records for two-socket server processors (and even a few four-socket records), many by eye-opening margins -- 64 percent, 87 percent and 154 percent were numbers that flashed on the screen during Gelsinger's presentation on benchmarking.

And Nehalem apparently saves its best for virtualized workloads. The processor gets 160 percent better performance over the previous record holder as per VMware's VMmark benchmark, the largest performance gain for any of the new records set by the new Xeons.

"We see the 5500 as the perfect platform for server pool flexibility, virtualization and energy efficiency in the data center," Gelsinger said.

To that effect, he and an Intel colleague demonstrated a single Xeon 5500-based system running a heavy SQL database workload with no trouble on virtual machines migrated over from three older Intel Woodcrest servers -- and drawing three times less power with the full workload than the older boxes set on idle.

Another demonstration centered on Intel's new Turbo Boost feature, described by Gelsinger as "wicked cool technology." Turbo Boost, present on several of the new quad-core 5500 series Xeons, acts as a circuit breaker to dynamically shut off individual processor cores that aren't in use. That will likely show up as savings on the energy bill, but the power savings also can be sent over to the cores that are processing workloads to give them some extra oomph.

Nehalem also brings back Intel's hyper-threading technology and a number of other improvements over the previous Core generation of Xeon chips that boost power, energy efficiency or both. Gelsinger also promised a very easy transition from these 45-nanometer chips to the next generation of 32nm products code-named Westmere, due out by the end of the year or early 2010. The Westmere chips, including a six-core version, will drop into the same motherboard sockets as the Xeon 5500 parts, requiring a simple firmware update to get rolling.

But before that happens, Gelsinger pointed to two paths businesses might take in adopting Nehalem. The first, a one-for-one swap of older single-core Xeon servers for the new parts, would deliver nine times the performance in the data center, he contended. Or a customer might go the cost-savings route and replace those older servers with less than an eighth the number of Nehalem systems -- that would get you the same performance, but with a 90 percent reduction in energy costs.

Even more head-spinning, the second path would pay for itself in terms of capital expenditure in just eight months, according to Intel. Which, incidentally, wasn't even the most ambitious statement of the day -- Hewlett-Packard was promising a three-month ROI for customers swapping out its older ProLiant servers for the new ones.

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