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Dell Announces Two New Wintel/Lintel Servers
by Timothy Prickett Morgan
Dell took the wraps off two new Intel-based servers this week. IBM got to show off the new MXT SystemI/O chipset it co-developed with chip maker Broadcom's ServerWorks unit last week, and Dell is getting to show off the "Grand Champion" chipset from ServerWorks in its new PowerEdge 4600 this week. The Grand Champion GC-HE chipset is designed to support Intel's Pentium 4 Xeon processors, and will probably be the most popular chipset for those chips. Dell also announced a new Pentium III server, the PowerEdge 1650.
The PowerEdge 4600 is a two-way server, and it is first server in the world to supports the GC-HE chipset, which was announced almost exactly a year ago. This GC-HE chipset, along with the "Foster" server versions of the Pentium 4 Xeon processors, were expected to debut in the third quarter of last year, but continual delays with the Foster chips kept pushing the GC-HE chipset out, month after month. Not that most companies care yet, but the GC-HE chipset will be one of the first chipsets available at the low-end of the server market (and eventually in the midrange) to support PCI-X I/O, which is a kicker to the current PCI peripherals in use today on most servers. The prior generation ServerWorks chipset--the ServerSet HE III--supported single, dual, and quad processor configurations using Intel's 700 MHz and 900 MHz Pentium III Xeon processors. This chipset supported up to 16 GB of main memory in a single server and four memory banks that were interleaved to generate 4.1 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The GC-HE chipset will support dual and quad processor configurations, and uses DDR SDRAM memory. Like the new MXT SystemI/O chipset, the GC-HE chipset also implements IBM's Chipkill memory scrubbing, as well as ECC error correction. The chipset supports up to 32 GB of main memory in a single server and has 6.4 GB/sec of memory bandwidth. This higher memory capacity and bandwidth will be necessary to support the Pentium 4 Xeon processors, which run at 1.8 GHz, 2 GHz, and 2.2 GHz.
The PowerEdge 4600 can have one or two processors and comes with a single 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 Xeon processor and 512 MB of main memory. Main memory is interleaved four ways, which means customers have to add memory four sticks at a time (so that 512 MB of base memory is actually four 128-MB sticks of 200 MHz DDR SDRAM). The memory in the box can be expanded to 12 GB. The PowerEdge 4600 has six PCI-X 64-bit, 100 MHz peripheral slots, plus a legacy 32-bit, 33 MHz PCI slot. It is available in tower configurations and in a 6U form factor rack-mountable version. The base PowerEdge 4600 costs $3,499.
Dell says that the PowerEdge 1650 is a follow-on to its popular PowerEdge 1550 server. Both are 1U servers that use the ServerWorks HE-SL chipset, which supports up to two Pentium III processors and uses 133 MHz ECC SDRAM memory. The PowerEdge 1650 includes redundant fans and an option for redundant power supplies (both are hot-pluggable) as well as embedded RAID 5 data protection for disk drives and improved remote server management. The PowerEdge 1650 supports Intel's 1.13 GHz, 1.26 GHz, and 1.4 GHz Pentium III processors; it has a base memory of 256 MB, expandable to 4 GB. The base PowerEdge 1650 sells for $1,699.
In conjunction with this announcement, Dell cut the price on the PowerEdge 1550 by $200, to $1,299, under a special mail-in rebate deal. The PowerEdge 1550 uses 933 MHz, 1 GHz, 1.13 GHz, 1.26 GHz, and 1.4 GHz Pentium III processors. Memory is expandable from the base 128 MB to the maximum 4 GB.
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