IBM Launches Faster "Irwindale" Xeon Servers

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM will this week deliver versions of its xSeries and BladeCenter servers that employ the new "Irwindale" Xeon DP processor from Intel. The Irwindale chip is a variant of the 64-bit "Nocona" processor, except that it has 2 MB of L2 cache memory as well as the new Demand Based Switching (DBS) and SpeedStep power management and Execute Disable (XD) security enhancement. It has an 800 MHz frontside bus, just like the Nocona chip, which means it can plug into the exact same slots (see the separate story in this issue for more on the Irwindale chip).

IBM says that the xSeries and BladeCenter blade servers equipped with the new Irwindale chips, which have twice as much cache memory as the Noconas, can provide as much as an 18 percent performance boost, according to Intel's internal benchmarks. But the Irwindales are expected to run at the same clock speeds as the Noconas, so this will only be true on applications that can make use of that larger cache.

IBM says that the Irwindale chips will ship in four of its two-way servers and the HS20 two-way blade servers by the end of February. The xSeries 226 is a 4U tower or rack machine that supports from 512 MB to 16 GB of main memory, 1.8 TB of internal SCSI or 1 TB of internal SATA disks, and has three PCI-X, two PCI, and one PCI-Express slot. It costs $1,225 with a single Irwindale chip running at 3 GHz plus 512 MB of memory and no disk; it costs $1,475 to buy the machine with a three-year warranty. The xSeries 236 is a slightly larger 5U tower or rack server that supports the same memory configurations, but has room for nine disks. It has three PCI-X, two PC-Express and one PCI slot. It comes with a three-year warranty and costs $2,399 with a single 3 GHz processor, 1 GB of main memory, no disks, and a three-year warranty. The xSeries 336 is a 1U, rack-mounted server that can house two disk drives (300 GB SCSI Or 250 GB SATA) and has two PCI-X slots and an optional PCI-Express slot. It supports up to 16 GB of main memory as well, and costs $2,359 in a base configuration (1 GB of memory, one 3 GHz chip, no disk, and a three-year warranty). And finally, the xSeries 346 is a 2U rack-mounted server with four PCI-X or two PCI-X and two PCI-Express slots that has the same memory expansion as the other Irwindale-based xSeries machines being announced today. A base xSeries 346 comes with one 3 GHz processor and 1 GB of main memory; it costs $2,745 with that three-year warranty. IBM did not provide pricing on the HS20 blades.