HP Boosts Integrities with Madison 9Ms, Other Stuff

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

As we reported previously, Hewlett-Packard will this week upgrade its Itanium-based Integrity server line with the latest chips from Intel. Specifically, HP is rolling out the new 1.6 GHz/9 MB cache "Madison" processors into its entry and midrange rx series of Integrity machines as well as its top-end Superdome servers. HP has developed its own chipsets for the Integrity machines, and this round of server announcements does not include changes to those chipsets.

HP's entry and midrange Integrity boxes use an the zx1 chipset, code-named "Pluto." The zx1 chipset creates a traditional symmetrical multiprocessor cluster out of two or four processors. The zx1000, or "Pinnacles," chipset from HP is based on a cell architecture that uses a high-speed backplane to glue multiple four-way or eight-way SMP boards into a single system image. It is, in effect, an SMP made of cell boards, which have SMP on them. To further complicate things, HP also has created the "Hondo" mx2 dual Madison modules, which allow two physical Madison chips to share a single chip socket using yet another variant of SMP electronics. With the mx2 modules, HP can boost the SMP scalability of the basic Integrity boxes. I say "boost" rather than "almost double" because the baby SMP inside the Hondo chip has overhead (probably about 15 to 20 percent) and also because HP clocks down the Madison chips because of heating issues (you lose about 30 percent or so there). A Hondo with two Madisons in one socket does not deliver twice the performance of two single Madisons in two sockets. In fact, it works out to about a 50 percent boost. HP allows customers to mix various Madison generations and mx2 modules within the same Pinnacles systems, by the way. However, each cell board has to have identical Madison or mx2 processors. So customers don't have to throw out what they have to make use of the various technologies for specific workloads.

With this round of announcements, HP is not creating new chipsets for the Integrity line of machines, but is sticking with the current Pluto and Pinnacles chipsets. According to Brian Cox, product line manager for HP's Business Critical Systems unit, HP will not create new chipsets until the future dual-core "Montecito" Itaniums come out later this year, perhaps in the summer. (The BCS unit, if you don't know HP's jargon, is responsible for the Itanium-based Integrity server line, the PA-RISC-based HP 9000 line, the Alpha-based AlphaServer line, the MIPS-based NonStop Himalaya fault tolerant server line; BCS is distinct from the Industry Standard Server unit, which makes Xeon-based and Opteron-based machines.) HP recently tweaked the entry Integrity machines to add faster I/O and networking, creating the rx1620 and the rx2620; these machines were originally supposed to coincide with the Madison 9 MB launch, which was expected last August or September but which was delayed for several months by Intel. The Madisons were also expected to come in 1.7 GHz, 1.8 GHz, and 1.9 GHz clock speeds, apparently, and Intel was only about to get chips out the door running at 1.6 GHz. This is pretty much it until Montecito comes out. Cox said that HP had considered making an mx2 module out of the Madison 9MB chip, but after looking at the heating issues and how far it would have to clock it down, decided that it wasn't worth the trouble.

Montecito is expected to debut with two cores running at 2.2 GHz, with each core having its own front side bus running at 667 MHz or maybe 800 MHz. This will provide about four times the main memory bandwidth of the Madison chips. Each Madison core will have its own dedicated 12 MB of L3 cache memory, which should also boost performance compared to the Madison 9 MB chip. With HyperThreading activated--HyperThreading was not available on the Madison chips, but is on the Xeon chips--the Montecito processors should comfortably yield about twice the performance of the current Madison chips on most commercial workloads. The latest incarnation of Montecito (there have been many) is now expected sometime in the third quarter of 2005; only a few months ago Intel was talking about mid-2005. Cox says that once Intel rolls out Montecito, it will take a few months to test and certify the chip in the new Integrity servers, which could mean the current Madison 9 MB versions of the Integrity boxes are all that HP has to sell between now August, September, or later if Intel delays Montecito further.

HP has not yet made configuration and pricing information available for the entire Integrity line using the Madison 9MB chip, but on the rx 2620-2 (which uses the Pluto chipset) it costs $1,650 for a 1.3 GHz/4 MB Itanium 2 chip and $2,650 for a 1.6 GHz/9 MB chip, and on the rx4640-8 (also a Pluto box), it costs $3,200 for a 1.5 GHz/4 MB Itanium 2 chip and $5,775 for a 1.6 GHz/9 MB chip. If history is any guide, HP will charge a much higher amount than this for the same chips when used in the servers that use the Pinnacles chipset. The premium for extra performance that comes from the 1.6 GHz chip will be high in absolute dollars, but small when folded back into the overall system cost.

As HP rolls the new Madison 9 MB chip into the Integrities, the company's top brass are expected to reiterate its unshakable support for the Itanium and the multiple operating system strategy that both Compaq and HP had before they merged. On January 18, HP's chairman and CEO, Carly Fiorina, will host an event called Enterprise Computing Evolved, which will talk about HP's $3 billion commitment to the Itanium ecosystem and the fact that the current run rate of Itanium-based sales at HP is now at $1 billion--including servers, storage, services, and software. About a quarter of BCS shipments in 2004 were Itanium-based servers, and HP expects the Itanium share to rise to about 50 percent of BCS shipments by the end of 2005 and to 70 percent by the end of 2006. Fiorina will undoubtedly mention that the Itanium chip has over 3,000 applications certified across HP-UX, Linux, Windows, and OpenVMS platforms. That is double the number of applications available this time last year. It is reasonable that the Itanium ecosystem could add another 1,500 applications again this year, for a total of 4,500 by the end of 2005; there is a remote chance that the ecosystem could double the number, as it did in 2004, to around 6,000 by the end of 2005. A lot depends on how HP-UX, Linux, and OpenVMS take off on Integrity and how easy the ports to Itanium are from PA-RISC, Alpha, and X86 architectures.

Rich Marcello, general manager of HP's Business Critical Systems unit, is expected to announce that OpenVMS 8.2, the first version of the proprietary OpenVMS operating system to run on Itanium, has been ported to the Integrity servers, which means they can support HP-UX, Linux, Windows, and OpenVMS. As we reported last week, Red Hat's Enterprise Server 3 has already been certified on the full Integrity server line, and as part of this announcement, HP and Novell will reveal that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 has been certified to run on the full Integrity server line. SLES 8 only ran on entry and midrange Integrity machines. HP is guaranteeing that SLES 9 can scale to 16 processors in a single system image (which can be a whole server or a partition in a Superdome), up from 8 processors with SLES 8.

HP is also announcing it will now offer pay-per-use pricing on eight-way and larger Integrity machines running Windows, as it now does on its own HP-UX platform. It is unclear when Linux-based Integrity platforms will get this same functionality, but it is undoubtedly in the works. HP was unable to provide pricing details on how this pay-per-use model actually works, but says that pricing is roughly based on the cost of financing a machine and then only paying for the CPU, memory, I/O, and storage that a customer actually uses.

Finally, HP will remind everyone that it has committed to moving the Unix-based NonStop clustered database architecture from its current MIPS architecture to an Itanium-based architecture based on clustered Integrity servers. HP says it is still on track to deliver Itanium-based NonStop machines in mid-2005, which would seem at first to suggest that it will not wait for the Montecito chips. But then again, HP may announce the new NonStops when Intel rolls out the Montecitos, even though it cannot ship them for several months after the launch date. HP Services is not going to wait, however, and is immediately launching assessment and planning services for NonStop customers to help them make the jump to Itanium.