Thursday, December 19, 2002
IBM plans to launch a 16-processor servers, its highest-end mainstream machines using Intel's Xeon chips.
The system consists of two eight-processor, rack-mounted systems that are 7 inches tall and connected with high-speed cables.
An x440 with 16 processors and 8GB of memory costs $81,000, said Deep Advani, vice president of IBM's xSeries servers
It's the current flag-bearer for IBM's sustained effort to build ever more powerful Intel servers. The system uses the first version of Intel's Xeon MP processor, code-named Foster MP.
Intel's Itanium processor deals better with memory constraints. IBM plans to release an Itanium version of the x440 with four processors in early 2003, executives have said. Later in the year will come a 16-processor Itanium version and a 32-processor Xeon version.
The 16-processor x440's usefulness is limited by the comparative scarcity of software that runs well on high-end Intel servers, Eunice said. Although Microsoft's Windows operating system is getting better at taking full advantage of all the chips, higher-level software such as Exchange still needs work, he said.
Linux support will arrive later on the 16-processor x440, Advani said. "Linux right now scales pretty well to eight-way servers, and as it starts to scale beyond that we'll focus on that as well," he said.
Beginning early in the first quarter, IBM will support the newer Gallatin model of Xeon, which has more high-speed cache memory and therefore better performance, Advani said.
By: DocMemory
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