Intel Previews Eight-Core Nehalem-EX Xeon Servers

From DailyTech: Intel launched its Xeon 5500 series of server CPUs using Nehalem architecture at the end of March. Using lessons learned from the Core i7, the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer managed to achieve impressive performance gains while cutting power consumption dramatically. Sales have been impressive, and the company expects that it will account for 50% of all dual socket (2S) server sales by August.

DailyTech previously showed part of Intel's server roadmap, detailing a follow-up Xeon processor series known as Nehalem-EX. Intel is now releasing details about Nehalem-EX in order for its customers to include it in their planning.

Each Nehalem-EX processor will feature up to eight cores on a single chip, up to 24MB of shared cache, and support 16 threads with Hyper-Threading. The chip is built using Intel's P1266 45nm High-K metal gate technology, and will be comprised of 2.3 billion transistors. It will use the new Boxboro-EX chipset, and be able to support up to 16 DIMMs per socket. Eight socket systems capable of processing 128 threads simultaneously will be possible, since each chip will feature four Quick Path Interconnects.

Intel is also moving away from Fully-Buffered DIMMs to DDR3 Registered ECC DIMMs. It will use its Scalable Memory Interconnect, which has its own internal memory buffers. A new feature known as Machine Check Architecture (MCA) recovery will detect CPU, memory, and I/O errors. It is designed to work with operating systems to correct and recover from otherwise fatal system errors, thus maintaining critical uptime. Microsoft, RedHat, Novell, and VMware are already promising support in their products.

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