Intel Reveals Atom "Avoton" for Micro-Servers Due Next Year

Intel Corp. has outlined its vision and roadmap for microservers and discussed how they best suited to handle emerging “scale-out” applications. According to Intel, in a bid to ensure truly high performance when it is needed and truly maximum power efficiency when it is required, the industry needs infrastructure that supports both high-performance Xeon chips as well as low-power Atom chips.

"I believe the industry needs infrastructure that allows them to deploy servers in an efficient manner and have different versions that meet their requirements. Not only do the servers have to adapt to a range of requirements, but they should have the full set of features that customers require: 64-bit pointers and arithmetic, ECC, virtualization support, software compatibility and offer it across both brawny and wimpy cores," said Jason Waxman, general manager of the cloud infrastructure group at Intel.

In a bid to avoid "brawny" (Xeon) versus "wimpy" (Atom) decision making for data centers, Intel proposes to install both Atom-based and Xeon-based nodes and then let software to decide which nodes to use. The exact approach of the initial implementation was not disclosed, but it is likely that at first it may either include different servers or HP Gemini-like infrastructure, whereas eventually heterogeneous many-core microprocessors with different x86 cores for servers may emerge.

The Intel executive provided an update on Intel's roadmap for microservers including new generations of Intel Xeon "Haswell" processors and Intel Atom architecture based 22nm SoC chips codenamed "Avoton", both scheduled for 2013. Unfortunately, Intel did not provide any details about the new Avoton chip, but given the fact that Intel wants Haswell and Avoton to co-exist in data centers, general capabilities of Avoton and Haswell should be in many cases similar.

"Datacenter infrastructure architects and IT decision makers have enough decisions to make. Given the uncertainty in the evolution of code, it’s only going to get harder to predict the ideal infrastructure. As hardware developers, we need to give customers the opportunity to have infrastructure flexibility and a choice of options that maintain consistency of features and compatibility," said Mr. Waxman.

Source: Xbitlabs.com

Tags: Atom, Avoton, Haswell, Intel, Processor, Servers, Xeon

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8 Core Xeon E5 Processor in New Mac Pro

A recent rumor came up, suggesting that Apple will announce a new Mac Pro at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference. The machine is said to feature Intel Xeon E5 series processors with six or eight cores, as well as Thunderbolt and USB 3.0.

Refreshing the Mac Pro Lineup

Prior to this, a list of purported Apple part numbers has emerged, a couple of day before the 2012 WWDC kicks off. The list suggests that Apple will refresh majority of its Mac products, including the Mac Pro. In fact, The Loop’s Jim Dalrymple made a remark that the Cupertino-based company will release a new and that they are less likely to phase the product out.

The news came out after professional video editor Lou Borella created a Facebook petition group called We Want a New Mac Pro. The group’s goal is for the company to give an indication whether people should wait for a new desktop tower or come up with another plan.

Inside the New Mac Pro

In addition to the mentioned specs, the desktop tower will boast 1600 MHz memory with 8 channels—a far improvement from the 1333 MHz memory that it available on previous Mac Pro generation. The memory enhancement can be attributed to the USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt support.

Carrying a moniker of K5B, the machine will also have SATA III/SAS 6 GB-per-second drive connectivity, and native PCI-Express 3 support for video cards. The SATA III/SAS is deemed as a major boost for the solid-state drive’s speed. On the other hand, the PCI-Express 3 support with 40 lanes per socket will have enhanced RAID arrays and video cards.

There were also claims that the machine’s onboard memory controller has been moved to the CPU itself, which could improve its performance big time.

No Ivy Bridge Processor on Mac Pro this Time

What’s missing in the new Mac Pro is the Intel Ivy Bridge processor. It was reported that Apple will upgrade its MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, iMac and Mac mini to the manufacturer’s latest chip this year. However, the desktop tower is unlikely to have the Ivy Bridge, probably because it can’t handle voltage the same way its 32 nm Sandy Bridge kin can.

Other than the Mac Pro, Apple is also expected to update its 15-inch MacBook Pro, 11 and 13-inch MacBook Air, and 21.5 and 27-inch iMac next week. Meanwhile, the rest of the MacBook Pro lineup, as well as the Mac mini, will get a refresh later this year.

Source: Amog

Tags: Xeon, Processor, Mac Pro, IMac, Desktop PC, Apple, Xeon E5, Intel

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Ivy Bridge servers and more to come

Yet another in a long line of badly kept secrets, Intel has yet to give the green light to products based on its Xeon E3-1200 v2 family of server processors. That, though, hasn’t stopped Dell jumping the gun and announcing plans to use the new chips, based on the 22nm Ivy Bridge architecture, to boost the performance and lower the TDP of its PowerEdge C5220 microserver platform.

Don’t be fooled by the microserver tag here. We’re not talking about miniature small business servers, designed to sit unobtrusively on the desk or a shelf, but high density rack-mount hardware for use in shared datacentres. Indeed the C5220 is based on a 3U chassis capable of accommodating 8-12 server “sleds”, each with a socket for one of the new processors plus four memory slots.

Despite the lack of an offical launch there’s not much not already known about the Ivy Bridge Xeons, which will employ the same Tri-Gate transistor technology as desktop variants already in the wild. In addition, they will deliver essential server-like features such as support for ECC memory and on-chip virtualisation plus, of course, 64-bit processing across multiple cores with HyperThreading.

Dell hasn’t said which of the new v2 processors it will employ, but has indicated that low-power 17 Watt and 45 Watt implementations will be included, with the former likely to be dual core and the latter quad. As a result the company is claiming an up to 95% performance increase compared to previous generation Xeons.

It also boasts up to 50% greater rack density, although that doesn’t mean being able to slot more server sleds into the chassis. Rather you’ll get the same processing power using slimmer sleds, with room for twelve of these compared to eight when the fatter sleds (needed to accommodate the heatsinks on higher wattage processors) are deployed.

Starting at $12,207 for a chassis and one sled, the PowerEdge C5220 with the new E3-1200 v2 processors will be available on May 22. Like other PowerEdge C servers, however, it won’t be available online or through resellers. Neither is it likely to be the only product to get the Ivy Bridge upgrade although we will have to wait for the official Intel launch on May 14 to find out what else Dell, and other vendors, have in store.

May 14 will also see the launch of the 4P Xeon E5-4600 plus the small business Xeon E5-2400 which we’ve been testing in the ZDnet Labs, so expect an exclusive preview of a new server based on this processor on the day.

Source: Zdnet

Tags: Ivy Bridge, Xeon, Servers, Processor

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Dell announces first server with Intel's Ivy Bridge Xeon chips

Dell's PowerEdge C5220 microserver is the first server to be announced with Intel's Xeon E3-1200 V2 chips


Dell on Tuesday announced a new microserver with Intel's first Xeon server processors based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture, which has not been officially announced by the chip maker yet.

Dell's PowerEdge C5220 is one of the first servers with Xeon chips based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture. The server is targeted at web 2.0, cloud and high-performance applications, Dell said in a statement.

The server runs on Intel's Xeon E3-1200 V2 series processors, which are faster and more power-efficient than previous E3 chips based on the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture.

An Intel spokesman said the new chips provide more performance-per-watt, and a server with E3-1200 V2 processors drawing 17 watts of power in a 3U rack space could provide 53 percent more performance than a 20-watt Sandy Bridge Xeon CPU.

The Xeon E3-1200 V2 chips draw between 17 watts and 45 watt of power, Dell said. The new Xeon E3-1200 V2 chips are made using the 22-nanometer process and include 3D transistors, which are faster and more power-efficient than 2D transistors found in existing 32-nm process chips.

Intel could not share further information about the new Xeon processors. Intel in April said that it would release its first Xeon server chips based on the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture later this quarter, which would be targeted at microservers. Microservers are low-power servers with shared components designed mainly for web serving and cloud applications.

The PowerEdge C5220 can scale performance while reducing the number of servers in a datacenter. Dell said. The server marker said the new microservers helped one company consolidate four servers into one while running a software infrastructure based on the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP software) stack.

The microserver will become available on May 22 starting at US$12,210, Dell said.

Source: Networkworld

Tags: Intel, Ivy Bridge, Xeon, Dell

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