Intel vs AMD at the uberserver front

SHANGAHAI IS AN INFINITLEY LARGER and more powerful place to name a brand after than Beckton - but it won't be so simple in the upcoming face-off of their high-end MP server CPU namesakes at the start of this year's last quarter.

This coming week, Intel will unveil more - but not all - details of the enterprise Nehalem Xeon 7500 series, aka Beckton. Unlike the dual-CPU Gainestown Xeon 5500 series Nehalem, which is identical to the Core i7 plus an extra QPI link for DP operation, and in the same LGA1366 socket, the Beckton is a different beast: nearly three times larger trannie-budget wise at 2.3 billion, eight whole cores with L3 cache tripled to 24 MB - hopefully without too bad latency hit, four memory channels and, of course, four QPI links. You'll need an even larger LGA1567 socket for all this.

The happy memories are surely not plain vanilla DDR3 this time - most likely we're talking about some kind of micro-buffer approach rather than an FB-DIMM reincarnation here. Four channels, combined with those 'densest' Samsung 4 Gbit DDR3-1600 dies and some nice buffers, do give us 256 GB max per CPU if using two DIMMs per channel, or a whopping total of 2 TB memory at nearly half a terabyte per second raw bandwidth in an 8-socket glueless machine. Not to mention in excess of 600 GFLOPs peak if running at a conservative 2.66 GHz. Now, that would be one uber-workstation to finally run Vista without ever slowing down.

Four QPI links, north, south, east and west, give you the hyper-cube or torus-like system NUMA internal interconnect capability, and yes, you could put far more than eight CPUs together. The near-comatose but still alive SGI shadow of former Silicon Graphics, the love of my teenage years, might have one such - say 512-CPU - glueless box towards year end.

How about the AMD answer? Well, the long overdue DDR3 and HT3 re-fit of Shanghai / Deneb chippery might bring us some lovely scaling and performance surprises. Not sure if there will be four memory channels - strongly doubt it - but even two DDR3 banks plus four sped-up HT3.1 links at speed matching the QPI could be a kind of threat in price-sensitive deals, especially since this time AMD may not be too shy to push the new CPUs well beyond 3 GHz if so required. On the other hand, these are only quad-core ones - so raw power per socket is way behind Intel too.

Technically, Beckton is a magnificent aircraft carrier-sized giant that will mean Intel taking back the MP system performance leadership across all levels from AMD for the first time in like three years or so. However, the delta won't be much this time if AMD takes up the chance and manages to return favour with more multi-core designs and wider memory paths per socket - the HT3 by itself holds its own very well. Whether AMD pricing and marketing policies will stand up to the giant's challenge, remains to be seen.

Oh... by the way. Would anyone like a spin of the abovementioned Beckton to sit in an LGA1366 mobo as a truly Extreme Core i7? The games and PC software in general are far more multithreaded by now, after all. µ