Guild Companies

While everyone is talking about the arrival of the "McKinley" Itanium 2 64-bit processors that Intel announced last week, one of the key components that will make the Itanium 2 platform take off in the midrange or not is the associated E8870 chipset created by Intel. The E8870, formerly known as the i870 chipset, allows Intel to scale from 2 to 16 processors in a single system image. This is the core midrange market that ServerWorks, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, NEC, and Fujitsu Siemens are targeting with their own chipsets.

The E8870 chipset is essentially a four-way chipset like the i460GX chipset for the original "Merced" Itanium processor that was announced this time last year. But that's about where the similarities end, thankfully. The i460GX chipset was terribly crippled in terms of the memory bandwidth and I/O bandwidth that it delivered, which is one of the reasons why the 1 GHz McKinley chip is showing performance gains of 1.5 to 2 times that of the 800 MHz Merced processors. The E8870 chipset has a 400 MHz quad-pumped, 128-bit system bus that yields 6.4 GB/sec of bandwidth between the bus and the four McKinley processors in the box. The chipset supports a 6.4 GB/sec memory bus, which links to four Double Data Rate SDRAM slots. The first generations of servers using the E8870 chipset will support 128, 256, and 512 megabit memory as well as 1 gigabit memory; with the 1 gigabit chips, maximum memory capacity is 32 GB on the four-way machine. With 4 gigabit SDRAM chips, the maximum memory capacity will quadruple to 128 GB, which is a lot of main memory. The I/O bus supports up to four PCI-X controllers, each with 1 GB/sec of bandwidth, each supporting two 64-bit, 133MHz PCI-X slots. The memory and processors are also hot pluggable, which is a nice feature; I/O has long since been hot pluggable at the high-end of the Wintel and Lintel server markets.

Intel has, as you might imagine, set its sights higher than the four-way server market with the Itanium 2 processors. Through an adjunct to the E8870 chipset called the E9870 scalability port, servers using the E8870 can be glued together in NUMA-like fashion with 8, 12, or 16 processors in a single system image. (This is a similar approach to that take by IBM with its EXA chipset for 32-bit and 64-bit Intel processors; this chipset is also known by its code name, "Summit.") There are two E9870 scalability ports per E8870 chipset, and these are cross-linked to scalability ports on other motherboards using the E8870 chipset to create the NUMA cluster. Each port consists of two 3.2 GB/sec channels, and when all four scalability ports are used in the 16-way configuration, the aggregate peak interconnect bandwidth is 25.6 GB/sec. A machine with 16 processors using the E8870/E9870 combo would have a huge amount of processing power—perhaps as much as 250,000 transactions per minute on online benchmarks using the current 1 GHz McKinley chips, or maybe even more depending on the efficiency of the scalability port—and up to 128 GB of main memory today and up to 1 TB of main memory when 4 gigabit memory chips are available, probably late next year.

According to Intel, the major operating systems available on the Intel platform—that's Microsoft's Windows and the open source Linux on 64-bit Itanium processors, unless IBM gets AIX on the chip and Sun Microsystems gets Solaris on it, too—will support hardware partitioning on the E8870 chipset when used in conjunction with the E9870 scalability port. It ic unclear if the 64-bit implementations of Linux and Windows will be supported concurrently within different partitions on the same machine, but this should be possible. Intel has also been mum on whether or not the current 32-bit "Foster" Xeon MP processors or the future "Gallatin" Xeon MP processors will be supported on the E8870 chipset. About 18 months ago, Intel was indicating that the Gallatin Xeon MPs would be supported on the i870 chipset, but maybe with the name change on the chipset Intel has also dropped support for the 32-bit processors on the machines as a way to encourage customers and vendors to give the Itanium 2 processors a try.

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