Pat Gelsinger tagged his Monday blog post “awesome”, although he was probably referring to the Xeon 5500 server processor, formerly known as Nehalem, rather than his own prose.
The head of Intel’s Digital Enterprise Group also used the word “spectacular” several times during his presentation at the launch of the 5500 at Intel headquarters. It was Intel’s best ever piece of engineering, he said, and the most important server product since the Pentium Pro in 1995.
Afterwards, he spoke to us about the awesomely spectacular 5500. The highlights:
“I don’t expect for five years, maybe for 10 years we’ll have this big a leap again and knowing the roadmap detail for the next five years I can make that statement pretty definitively. We think this creates what we call the “cloud architecture” – a dynamically scalable, energy-efficient platform. When was the last time I stood up and showed a 150 per cent performance improvement on a benchmark? I just can’t remember doing that since the Pentium Pro.
You talked about leaving the competition in the dust, does that include AMD’s Shanghai server chip?
The performance gains we showed over the previous 5400 processor, all 30 of them are new two-socket [servers equipped with two of the quad-core processors] records, and every one of those benchmarks bar one beats the four-socket Shanghai. We see Nehalem having a much bigger impact on their four-socket business than our own four-socket one.
Where will you be able to make the biggest impact with Nehalem?
We do see strength in high-performance computing and high-perfomance cloud data centres. We see all the economic trends supporting that and these markets will grow much faster than the rest of the server market.
Second, given an eight month ROI (return on investment), that’s a recession-buster product – 40 per cent of all servers are one core, if you replace those with [four-core] Nehalem, after eight months, you have produced positive cash for the IT department. We’re reviewing our refresh plans for this year for our own data centres – we’re accelerating those plans because the numbers are so spectacular.
Third, there is an infrastructure build that’s coming to support the global economic stimulus – if you look at the US’s $700bn, China’s $500bn etc, every one of those stimulus packages includes a meaningful element to go to IT infrastructure, and we think that we’re starting to see some of the earliest signs of that – they are gearing up for building the broadband infrastructure, the next science proposals, we think we are starting to see some of the earliest indications that we will see build out of next-generation IT infrastructure to support those projects.”
