Intel Gearing Up for Battle on the Server Front

Published: March 9, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Intel has been talking about its future dual-core server processors for so long now that it is hard to remember that many of them are not shipping yet and that rival Advanced Micro Devices has been able to use its competitive advantage in performance and thermals to capture quite a bit of market share. At the Intel Developer Forum this week in San Francisco, the company was talking up the future chips and platforms that it believes will put Intel back in the lead in 2006.

Pat Gelsinger, Intel's former chief technology officer and the general manager of the company's Digital Enterprise Group, which makes processors, chipsets, and motherboards for desktop and server platforms, aimed his opening comment squarely at AMD. "New process. New products. New platform. Closer than you think," he said somewhat menacingly (albeit in that practiced way that IT executives and politicians have). The basic message was that, while Intel may have stumbled in the past few years, it is focused and it is bringing to bear a new architecture, now officially called the Core Architecture, as well as a new 65 nanometer process that Intel believes will give it a serious competitive advantage against AMD.

This, of course, remains to be seen. With AMD moving to its own 65 nanometer process with the "RevF" Opterons in mid year, Intel had to make some pretty big gains in performance and performance per watt to stay ahead of AMD. But Gelsinger said that, based on competitive analysis, he was sure that with the "Woodcrest" family of Xeon processors, due in the third quarter of this year, that Intel's server platforms would nonetheless best whatever AMD could deliver with the RevF Opterons.

This, of course, remains to be seen. With AMD moving to its own 65 nanometer process with the "RevF" Opterons in mid year, Intel had to make some pretty big gains in performance and performance per watt to stay ahead of AMD. But Gelsinger said that, based on competitive analysis, he was sure that with the "Woodcrest" family of Xeon processors, due in the third quarter of this year, that Intel's server platforms would nonetheless best whatever AMD could deliver with the RevF Opterons.

Gelsinger said that by the end of 2006, 85 percent of the X64 servers sold would be using dual-core processors, mimicking a very aggressive ramp to 64-bit processors in 2005. He said that Intel expected to have an annual ship rate of over 1 million servers with support for its Virtualization Technology, or VT, features by 2009, and that over 250,000 such machines shipped in 2005, since VT was added into the "Paxville" Xeon DP and MP processors (which came to market five months early last year). As 2006 comes to a close, Gelsinger predicted that 90 percent of the servers shipping would support VT, which is being added to all the future Core processors as well as the "Montecito" Itanium chip, due in mid-2006.

Because virtualization is part of the equation that IT managers are calculating to reduce power consumption and heat in their data centers, Gelsinger and his colleagues are big on virtualization, and that is why Intel this week rolled out the next generation of VT technology, called VT for Distributed I/O, or VT-d, which will bring I/O virtualization support into the chips, much as instruction set virtualization is being brought in with VT. This will allow hypervisors, such as those created by VMware or XenSource, to virtualize disk I/O and networking I/O as well as CPUs inside servers.

VMware's president, Diane Greene, took the stage to throw her support behind the VT-d specification. She said that the company's ESX Server 3.0 hypervisor and Virtual Center 2.0 management software would support VT this year, and that VMware had received the VT-d spec and was thrilled to be working on adding support for virtualized I/O to its software. She added that VT-d will be supported in ESX Server in 2007. With this support, virtual partitioning on X64 platforms will be neck-and-neck with RISC/Unix platforms.

Gelsinger said Intel had shipped about 250,000 "Truland" Xeon MP platforms since they were announced last year, which use the dual-core Paxville MP processors, and that IBM would announce a four-socket machine using these processors that could crank through 273,000 transactions per minute (TPM) on the TPC-C online transaction processing benchmark test.

As for future server platforms, Gelsinger said that the kicker to the Paxville MP processor, code-named "Tulsa," was on tack for delivery in the second half of 2006. The dual-core Tulsa chip is implemented in 65 nanometers will have a 16 MB shared L2 cache on chip and "Pellston Technology" power management technologies. This chip is still a Pentium 4 Xeon, not a Core, at heart.

The chips that Intel seems most excited about will plug into its "Bensely" server platform, which includes the new "Blackford" chipset. This chipset sports dual-independent buses for the cores running at 1.33 GHz, 667 MHz fully buffered DIMM main memory, and an integrated, dual Gigabit Ethernet on the chipset (this is the first time Intel has talked about this feature, which is called "Gilgal"). The Bensely platform will support the dual-core "Dempsey" processor, which is a 65 nanometer rev of Paxville, as well as the Core-derived dual-core "Woodcrest" chip and a quad-core variant of the Core architecture called "Clovertown." Dempsey will run at 3.7 GHz and use a 1.066 GHz front side bus, and, no matter what Intel says, seems to be an interim product as we await Woodcrest. The Bensely platform will ship before the end of the month using Dempsey processors, but the 3 GHz Woodcrest chip, using the faster front side bus--and delivering 85 percent more performance than the dual-core Paxville with 35 percent lower power consumption--won't ship until the third quarter.

Woodcrest is the chip that will have to beat the Opteron RevF chips from AMD. Like Gelsinger, Kirk Skaugen, general manager of the Server Platforms Group, was bragging at IDF that these platforms would beat anything AMD could deliver, and his boss backed him up with a much broader statement.

"Core will have the leading performance per watt across all platforms as far as we can see out into the future," said Gelsinger. By consolidating down to one chip microarchitecture and by concentrating on the server market where AMD is getting the most traction for its Opterons--what Gelsinger called a "server first" strategy--AMD is probably about to get embroiled in a price war that pits its fabs against Intel's.

"In a good year at Intel, we have a new process or a new microarchitecture," said Skaugen. "This year, we are doing both, and people know that this is where market share is won and lost."