I thought the Intel Xeon 7500 (Nehalem-EX) processors were supposed to launch today, I was confused earlier when I didn’t see any news on it, well finally The Register posted some news.
I will keep it short and sweet this time:
- Intel Nehalem-EX L7555 1.86Ghz 95W 8-core processor price is $3,157 (in 1,000-unit quantities)
- AMD Opteron 6174 2.2Ghz 80W 12-core processor price is $1,165 (in 1,000 unit quantities)
Touch choice indeed.
If you want more than four sockets of course you will likely not be able to use an off the shelf Opteron 6100 system(may need to build your own chipset), but the justification behind this decision by AMD seems very reasonable:
That 100 GB/sec of memory bandwidth in the forthcoming four-socket Opteron 6100 machine is one of the reasons why AMD decided not to do eight-socket configurations with these chips. “It is a lot of development work for a not very large market,” says Fruehe, who reckons that there are only about 1,800 x64-based eight-socket servers sold worldwide each quarter and that the number is dwindling as four-socket boxes get more powerful.
“Intel is raving about having 15 different designs for its upcoming Nehalem EX machines, but how many is each vendor going to get out of those 1,800 units?” Fruehe says that the 8P boxes account for less than two-tenths of a percent of current shipments each quarter, and that while 4P boxes are only accounting for around 4 per cent, “even though it is a small space, AMD needs to be there.”