HP Eager to Sell Dual-Core Servers, Unfazed By Dell Rumors

Published: January 18, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

With 2006 in half-swing and eagerly anticipated as being the Year of the Dual-Core Processor, Hewlett-Packard is gearing up to make some big sales in its ProLiant line of Xeon and Opteron servers. HP was one of the first vendors to get dual-core processors to market last year, and it is hoping that the enthusiasm for more performance in the same footprint for about the same power usage and about the same money is going to help it maintain its pole position in X64 server shipments.

It will be interesting to see if the transition from single- to dual-cores goes as easily as the transition from 32-bits to 64-bits did--once Intel was forced to admit by the success of the AMD Opteron chip that Itanium was not the only or easiest way to get to 64-bit processing for X86 customers. When launching its roadmaps in 2004, Intel said it expected that the transition to 64-bit Xeons would be largely finished as 2005 ended, and that indeed turned out to be the case. In fact, by the end of the second quarter of 2005, approximately 90 percent of server processor shipments were for 64-bit capable iron. To be sure, customers are buying 64-bit machines not because they need 64-bits for all of their applications today--much of the code running on Windows and Linux is 32-bit code, and there is still some 16-bit code lurking out there--but because they want to invest in hardware that can do either 32-bit or 64-bit processing. And even if their applications cannot make use of 64-bit memory addressing, the underlying operating systems can and that by itself often improves performance a bit--approximately 10 to 15 percent for most workloads.

While the transition from 32-bit to 64-bit processors was made easier because older modes were supported on the new iron, the move from single-core chips with relatively high clock speeds to dual-core chips with lower clock speeds may not be a painless one for some customers. Some customers, for instance, have single-threaded applications, which means clock speed is the main indicator of performance and a second core in a socket is like legs on a snake.

"I've seen this sort of thing at some customers," says Steve Cumings, group manager for marketing at HP's Industry Standard Servers unit. But, he adds, this is not a concern at a lot of customers--at least so far. Dual-core server processors are still a fairly new technology in the X64 market, so it will come down to applications. Just like the main X86 operating systems were tweaked to take advantage of HyperThreading on the Xeons (which was a kind of virtual dual-core in a single chip) and then 64-bit processing (in both the Xeons and the Opterons, which did not have simultaneous multithreading, aka HyperThreading), Windows and Linux have been adapted to take advantage of the two threads per core that are in dual-core processors. This will certainly speed up adoption, since multiple cores allow for a certain amount of application isolation on a single machine. It can run two jobs at once--such as a firewall and a Web server--without the workload on one affecting the performance on the other.

"The mainstream server customer is just going to adopt dual-core as a matter of course," explains Cumings, adding that large customers who have qualified a particular single-core ProLiant as their application platform (perhaps to remote offices) will continue to deploy these boxes because of the arduousness of purchasing and qualifying machines.

HP has been shipping dual-core ProLiant servers using the Opteron processors since April 2005, and rolled out machines supporting the "Paxville" Xeon DP and MP processors in the fall. However, HP only completely rounded out its ProLiant line when it began shipping the two-socket, rack-mounted ProLiant DL360; the two-socket, tower ML 370; and the two-socket, blade BL20p servers on January 9. (These machines were announced in early December.)

"Paxville is a great processor," says Christina Tines, product marketing manager for Intel servers at the Industry Standard Servers unit. She says that on benchmark tests comparing the single-core "Nocona" Xeon DPs against the dual-core Paxville DPs, HP is seeing a 30 percent or larger performance improvement. This is, obviously, a lot more of a performance jump than Intel has been able to squeeze out by cranking the clocks on Xeon processors in the past several years. And while Tines has lots of nice things to say about the Paxvilles, she has even higher expectations for the "Dempsey" dual-core Xeon DPs, which HP will start shipping in a revamped ProLiant line in the second quarter. "We are expecting at least twice the performance with these machines as we see with current single-core Xeons," says Tines.

HP cites a number of other factors that will help drive the adoption of dual-core processors in servers this year in the X64 market. The raw performance boost of moving to a dual-core chip allows customers to pack more oomph in a given footprint and still stay within a thermal envelope and at a price point. This has happened just as virtualization software for Windows and Linux is mature enough for enterprise deployments. And, says Tines, quad-pumped memory buses, DDR2 main memory, serial storage, and PCI Express I/O are all coming online in servers at the exact moment when the increase in processor performance enabled by dual-core chips allows it to be used effectively.

"This transition to dual-cores is going pretty much as expected--which means quite fast," says Cumings, who declined to provide shipment numbers (so he could keep his job). "The beauty of the dual-core solution is that you get more performance without paying the power penalties." Tines took a jab at IBM's Power4 and Power5 processors, which show excellent performance, but which run pretty hot. Then again, so does the Itanium processor that the other side of HP's server house--the Business Critical Servers unit--loves so well. What Cumings would say is that the majority of Opteron-based ProLiant sales have dual-core processors in them. He added that customers in the financial services and high performance computing areas were among the early adopters of dual-core servers, mainly because of their need for extra bang while staying in the same electricity and cooling budget.

But for mainstream commercial customers, the big question mark has been how software will be priced on dual-core servers. Now that Oracle Corp has made some sense of its pricing--even if it does require system and software buyers to do some math to calculate the number of licenses they need--and Microsoft, IBM, VMware, and others have pushed to see dual-core processors treated like single-core machines in terms of software pricing--something IBM would never do on its iSeries and pSeries lines, mind you--the pricing issue for software licenses seems to be solved. At least for the moment. As I have said before, I do not believe that software vendors will not tolerate this core-agnostic software pricing scheme as four, six, eight, or more cores are added to processors. Software prices cannot scale with Moore's Law without forcing a lot of software companies to go broke.

But for mainstream commercial customers, the big question mark has been how software will be priced on dual-core servers. You can't pay twice as much for software and only get 30 to 40 percent more performance. Now that Oracle Corp has made some sense of its pricing--even if it does require system and software buyers to do some math to calculate the number of licenses they need--and Microsoft, IBM, VMware, and others have pushed to see dual-core processors treated like single-core machines in terms of software pricing--something IBM would never do on its iSeries and pSeries lines, mind you--the pricing issue for software licenses seems to be solved. At least for the moment. As I have said before, I do not believe that software vendors will not tolerate this core-agnostic software pricing scheme as four, six, eight, or more cores are added to processors. Software prices cannot scale with Moore's Law without forcing a lot of software companies to go broke.

"That's a very interesting point," concedes Cumings. "I don't disagree that we could see something totally different in terms of software pricing for the X64 server market further down the road as more cores are added. But at least for now, the dual-core server customers are not being penalized."

By virtue of AMD having delivered a full line of dual-core, 64-bit processors well ahead of Intel, HP was able to get the jump on a lot of vendors because of its relatively early and enthusiastic support of the Opteron. The big question mark is what will happen to HP's momentum in dual-core servers, which is driven mostly by actual Opteron sales and hopeful expectations for Paxville and Dempsey sales, when and if Dell goes toe-to-toe with HP with a line of Opteron and another line of Xeon dual-core servers. There are rumors, yet again, that Dell is pondering a move to Opterons for notebooks, desktops, and servers.

"Who knows what Dell is going to do," says Cumings with a laugh. "But whatever Dell does, it is not going to change our product line or our strategy. We are leading in a new market--as we tend to do--and they are playing catch up."