Apple to offer more powerful Nehalem server
A page on Apple’s Hong Kong online store states that you can now pre-order the Xserve server running on Intel’s powerful new Xeon Nehalem chipset, confirming a widely spread rumor.
Not only does the Hong Kong Web page contain the phrase “Preorder the new Xserve with Intel Xeon (Nehalem),” but the customizations options for the old Xserve product line have been turned off on that site, an indication that only stock older-generation Xserve models can be ordered. The new server cannot be ordered as yet, though, because the new link has not yet been activated.
Although Apple rarely comments on future products, it is believed that the upcoming servers could carry quad-core chips from the Xeon 5500 and 3500 family. Apple has already included these chipsets in its Mac Pro workstations, which it launched last month. Intel has stated that these Xeon chips are its fastest server chips to date, and can be manufactured and set up to run at speeds of 3.46GHz, according to a PC World article.
Intel’s Nehalem micro-architecture improves system speed by cutting bottlenecks that were a problem with Intel’s earlier chips. In some circumstances, these new Nehalem chips could double server performance while consuming less power than their predecessors, which were from the Intel Penryn family.
Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research, believes that the chips’ improved energy consumption / performance ratio gives server operators a good reason to upgrade. McCarron says, “The idea of saving power is more pervasive in Nehalem. You’re seeing a much more fine-grained level of power control across [switches] on the chip.”
The new Nehalem chipset integrates the memory controller with the CPU, which helps the processor communicate more quickly with memory. This proximity removes the memory latency that affected earlier Intel processors negatively, translating into better server performance. Data-intensive applications such as video processing require processors to repeatedly fetch information from memory. These operations needed to pass through the front-side bus (FSB) on previous Intel chip sets. Intel has finally removed the FSB and integrated the memory controller directly into the CPU with the Nehalem series.
There is further speculation that the servers will ship with an enhanced operating system, which would allow for processor throttling to improve parallel processing operations without hurting non-parallel performance. The new server OS is also expected to save additional power by more intelligently spreading processing across multiple processors.
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April 16th, 2009
The fact that Apple is taking up Nehalem Servers is quite exciting.
While the previous one Penryn was a die shrink of an existing architecture, Nehalem is a brand new architecture built on the same 45nm process as Penryn.
Though Nehalem is a new architecture, it is still built on the same 45nm process that debuted with Penryn, it provides a high performance and an excellent power usage which is 30% lesser than the former.