With the rapid growth of algorithmic trading and widespread automation of financial instruments, high performance computing requirements have become mainstream in the industry. At the same time, consolidation and power efficiency have become top priority for all IT managers, making virtualization the hot topic of the day.

Dimitrios Ziakas Enterprise Architecture Manager Inte

In this new era of computing where multi-core architectures are seen as the way forward and power efficiency is at the epicenter of everything we do, Intel is driving the cadence for innovation. (Fig 1) For multiprocessor servers, the recently introduced Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processor 7300 series-based platforms and the Intel® Core™ microarchitecture enable IT managers to maximize data center performance and density. The upcoming Penryn core is the next generation, 45nm² Intel Core 2 processor family and further enhances performance and energy efficiency. Planned for 2008, Nehalem is a truly dynamic and design-scalable microarchitecture that will deliver both performance on demand and optimal price/performance/energy efficiency for each platform³.

(Fig 1) Driving the cadence for innovation

The power from the new Intel dual-core and quad-core platforms open the possibilities for businesses to know more, know it faster, and respond more quickly whilst maintaining power consumption at manageable levels. On four socket and above platforms, the new Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processor 7300 series provides IT managers the confidence and capability to consolidate onto fewer systems. The energy efficiency gained from the Intel Core microarchitecture helps enable highly dense 80-watt or 50-watt processor-based rack and blade form factors. This allows you to take back control of data center cooling, power limitations, and space constraints.

Offering maximum flexibility, IT managers can now also build one compatible group of platforms for live migration across all of their Intel Core micro architecture based servers including one, two, and the new four processor Intel Xeon processor 7300 series-based servers. The ability to conduct live VM migration offers tremendous flexibility for fail-over, load-balancing, disaster-recovery, and real-time server maintenance scenarios. And thanks to a new feature called Intel® VT FlexMigration, IT will have the capability to add future Intel® Xeon® processor-based systems to the same resource pool when using future versions of virtualization software. This gives IT the power to choose the right server platform to best optimize performance, cost, power and reliability.

A quick look at the capabilities of Quad-Core Intel Xeon processor 7300 series-based servers reveals:

• Up to 2.25 times performance/watt compared to Dual-Core Intel Xeon processor 7100 series-based systems
• Up to 1.53 times database, 1.7 times enterprise resource planning (ERP), and 1.87 times e-Commerce performance improvements compared to Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® processor 7100 series-based systems
• Up to 4x memory capacity improvement, compared to previous generations of this platform

Click to see full server specifications

Beyond today’s multi-core designs, Intel’s Tera-scale Computing Research Program⁴ is Intel’s R&D effort to scale today’s dual-core and multi-core processors up to designs that have tens or hundreds of energy-efficient cores with teraflops of compute capability. This is what will be needed to handle the terabytes of data of tomorrow’s emerging applications. The worldwide program includes more than 80 projects as well as industry and academic collaborations.

The challenges to develop and fully utilize the future tera-scale platforms can be mind-boggling, in both hardware and software⁵ terms. But, the opportunities and benefits from putting these computing capabilities into the hands of future customers can be equally mind-bending.

¹http://download.intel.com/technology/eep/cadence-paper.pdf?iid=technology_next-gen+body_arch-silicon-cadence_pdf
²http://www.intel.com/technology/architecture-silicon/45nm-core2/index.htm?iid=archtech_home+45nm
³http://www.intel.com/technology/architecture-silicon/next-gen/index.htm?iid=archtech_home+nextgen
⁴http://techresearch.intel.com/articles/Tera-Scale/1421.htm
⁵http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/isn/home/MultiCore.aspx

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading ...

Filed under: Issue 3 - Fall 07