This quarter brought the arrival of Intel’s latest microarchitectural enhancement. Codenamed “Penryn”, the new core and corresponding family of 45nm processors represent a significant advancement in Intel’s microprocessor portfolio in terms of both microarchitecture and manufacturing process technology.

Dimitrios Ziakas Enterprise Architecture Manager Intel

Based on Intel’s leading-edge 45nm technology, this second generation of quad-core and dual-core CPUs catapult performance to new levels while reducing the overall average power draw.

Virtualization¹:

Let’s have a closer look at what this means to the financial community. For data center consolidation projects, these second generation quad-core CPUs for dual socket servers vastly improve virtualization performance. This is due to a number of changes at the silicon and platform level:

• Highest VMmark score with 65nm quad, more native performance with 45nm²
• Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT) FlexMigration allows live migration compatibility across generations of Intel processors
• Enhanced memory virtualization speeds up virtual machine transition (entry/exit) times by an average of 25 to 75 percent
• Intel® VT FlexPriority optimizes and accelerates virtualization on guest operating systems
• Intel® VT for directed input/output (I/O) provides reliability and security through device isolation and I/O performance with direct assignment
• Intel® VT for connectivity improves network performance and reduces CPU utilization with VMDq NIC enhancements

Energy Efficiency:

In terms of energy efficiency, the enhancements to the already excellent Intel® Core™ microarchitecture deliver industry-leading performance/watt and reduced average power draw:

• Up to 38% better performance/watt³ on previous generation of Intel prosessor
• Significant improvements in idle power, reducing system power
• Faster processors – lower CPU power
• More performance – same CPU power

The new processors increase the performance per given clock rate as well as increasing the frequencies. This leads to astonishing performance numbers, as can be seen in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1 Boosting Quad-Core Perfomance⁴
45nm, second generation Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® Processor 5400 Series

Performance:

Another important point is that these new Intel® Xeon® 5400 series processors are socket compatible with existing mainstream dual-socket servers extending the longevity of those servers and providing stability for your IT decisions. These performance benefits are fueled by some of the following silicon changes:

• Fast Radix-16 divider for fast division of numbers
• 50% larger on-die cache (up to 12MB), 24-way associativity
• Improved store and forwarding, improving cache performance
• Intel SSE4 Instructions 47 new SSE instructions Super Shuffle Engine – improved performance for shuffle-like operations such as pack, unpack and wider packed shifts

HPC and Trading Systems:

For high performance computing (HPC) and trading systems, the new line of CPUs help augment overall performance and throughput, as well as single-threaded performance for all segments – from dual-socket servers and workstations to desktop and laptop computers.

• PCIe Gen2 for HPC and workstations allowing a breadth of I/O and high-end graphics solutions
• 1600MHz front side bus enhancing platform performance
• Large snoop filter enhances memory subsystem performance
• 47 new SSE4 instructions with features to improve the compiler’s ability to vectorize code, video encode acceleration functions, floating point dot product operation, streaming load for high b/w to WC memory

With all this, we expect to end 2007 as dynamically as we plan to commence 2008. Fig. 2⁵ gives a flavor of the acceleration in server performance projected for 2008.

Fig. 2 Accelerating Server Preformance⁵
Intel server performance trajectory with 45nm

References

¹www.intel.com/technology/platform-technology/virtualization/

²Source: VMware as of 10-11-07. See: www.vmware.com/products/vmmark/results.html for details

³(38% performance/watt) Published/measured results on SPECjbb2005* – October 2, 2007. Comparison is between Xeon 5450 (3.00GHz/1333MHz/80W) and Xeon 5335 (2.33GHz/1333MHz/80W). Performance/watt calculated by dividing the performance by measured system power during steady state window. Any difference in system hardware or software design or configuration may affect actual performance.

⁴www.intelfasterfs.com/newsletter/07q4/technology/config.htm

⁵All products and performance information are preliminary and subject to change without notice

⁶Manufacturing Workflow: defined as concurrently running SPECapc* SolidWorks* 2005 and Fluent* 6.3.26 L1/L2, 5x concurrently. Source, Intel. Results on Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 series are Intel internal measured results, October 2, 2007. All other Quad-Core Intel Xeon results are based on measured/published results. Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processor X5356: www.spec.org, current as of September 17, 2007. www.intelfasterfs.com/newsletter/07q4/technology/config.htm.

Filed under: Issue 4 - Winter 07