Survey: Software Developers Moving Fast On Intel Nehalem

Senior software development professionals harbor some concerns about increased memory prices and hyperthreading issues associated with Intel's next-generation Nehalem microarchitecture, but more than four out of 10 are planning to deliver Nehalem-based products within a year.

A survey of 83 senior software development professionals conducted by Canton, Mass.-based NEI last month found that an additional 26.5 percent plan to build upon the Nehalem platform within 24 months and 12 percent will have something within three years. Just over 20 percent have no plans at all to deliver products based on Intel's new Xeon 5500 series of server processors, launched to great fanfare at the chip giant's Santa Clara, Calif., campus on the last day of March.

"We had certain thoughts about what we would expect to see [in the survey]. We felt like the release of the new technology was pretty compelling, but that maybe we were too close to the action. It was a little bit of a surprise to see how quickly people were planning to move on it," said Jeff Hudgins, vice president of marketing at NEI, a leading provider of application platforms, appliances and support services for software developers, OEMs and service providers.

With its new Nehalem-class processors, Intel has made significant changes to the memory allocation system of its previous-generation Core architecture and reprised its hyperthreading technology, while also jacking up overall performance for the five Core i7 desktop chips and 15 Xeon 3500 and 5500 series server/workstation parts it has released to date.

Respondents to the NEI survey cited those performance improvements as the No. 1 benefit of the new microarchitecture, but interestingly, bandwidth increases and the faster memory access achieved by eliminating the Core architecture's frontside bus were both considered more important than Nehalem's highly touted power-efficiency gains.

The benefit of faster memory was actually a fairly close second to performance improvements on the survey, but the focus on memory seems to be a double-edged sword in some software professionals' opinion. Intel moves fully to triple-channel DDR3 SDRAM with Nehalem, and roughly a quarter of respondents named price premiums for the newer type of memory as a concern as they develop products around Xeon 5500-based systems.

Another big worry was whether hyperthreading offered many immediate advantages -- about a third of respondents felt strongly that Windows and Linux operating systems were "limited" in their ability to take advantage of multithreaded Nehalem processor cores. Phrased another way, about a quarter of those surveyed said a top concern was that the "Xeon 5500 doesn't benefit single-threaded applications."

Concerns aside, Hudgins said software professionals' attitude towards the Nehalem server platform from Intel was a clear break from their traditional skepticism towards radically new processor architectures.

"In the past, there's always been a little bit of a wait-and-see attitude. But I think that so many people being ready to move quickly to this platform translates into an understanding that there's going to be meaningful and tangible ROI on their investment," he said.

Intel has promised a nine-month ROI for refreshing servers based on older, single-core chips with the new dual-core and quad-core Nehalem parts. Some server vendors are marketing even better returns, with Hewlett-Packard's promise of a three-month ROI for their new Nehalem-based ProLiant G6 servers leading the pack.