Intel Comes Out Swinging with Woodcrest Xeons

Published: June 28, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The two-socket SMP server is arguably what made the X86 architecture the dominant server platform in the world, and with the latest iteration of the Xeon, code-named "Woodcrest" and finally launched by the chip maker Monday, Intel is finally back in the driver's seat, pushing performance and efficiency, by many measures, above rival Opteron chips from Advanced Micro Devices. While Intel is enjoying some time in the sun starting this week, as Woodcrest goes into production, AMD is not just sitting around, and the question is whether or not Intel can keep pace.

In keeping with its new dual-core chip for two-socket servers, Intel hosted a two-city launch, with the Woodcrest being rolled out in New York and San Francisco at the same time. Pat Gelsinger, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's Digital Enterprise Group, took the red-eye to New York, and even though he missed a connecting flight in Chicago, still made it to the event. Most of the material he covered in the event has been previewed in prior Intel meetings in the past six months.

Intel has gone on at length about the "Bensley" two-socket platform and all of its innovations, and at the end of May launched the platform using the prior generation of "Dempsey" dual-core Xeon chips, which were technically known as the Xeon 5000s. The Woodcrest chips, which are the Xeon 5100s, deliver better performance and better performance per watt than the Dempseys, but as Gelsinger explained, the Dempsey was designed as the "street fighter" version, with a high clock speed (which is important on some workloads) and a lower price, making it the price/performance leader in the two-socket server space and something customers who are not worried about heat and electricity can acquire. Ditto for the earlier "Irwindale" single-core Xeons. Gelsinger said that "they have wonderful lifetimes" and that "they would just keep shipping forever."

In the computer business, forever is measured in years and the yardstick is customer demand. Customers who have qualified single-core Xeon processors in their massive server rollouts will be asking Intel to make them for some time. How long remains to be seen, but Gelsinger said that Intel fully expected that by the end of the year, about 90 percent of its production of Xeons would be for dual-core Xeon chips, and that the majority of those would be on the 65 nanometer process that Intel is using for the Woodcrest chips. (Dempsey is a 65 nanometer part, too, but the prior Xeons were 90 nanometer parts.) Intel has been ramping up its 65 nanometer, 300mm wafer capacity this year, and as of last Thursday, it had three fabs running--one in Arizona, one in Oregon, and the latter one in Ireland--and Gelsinger said that as of now, about half of Intel's chip volumes were using this new 65 nanometer process. By shrinking from 90 nanometers to 65 nanometers, Intel gets to make cooler chips that are also cheaper to manufacture.

There are seven Woodcrest chips. (Gelsinger said there were five--go figure.) They all have 4 MB of shared L2 cache memory for the two cores and support VT hardware-assisted virtualization, 64-bit memory extensions, I/O Acceleration Technology (for boosting I/O bandwidth), and sophisticated power management features that let the chips deactivated unused components so they can run cooler. These chips do not, unlike the Dempseys, support HyperThreading, which can boost performance but which takes up space on the chip.

Five of the Woodcrests have a 1.33 GHz front side bus. The fastest Woodcrest is the Xeon 5160, which runs at 3 GHz; it has an 80-watt thermal design point (TDP), and costs $851 in 1,000-unit quantities. The Xeon 5150 runs at 2.66 GHz and only burns 65 watts, making it roughly equivalent to the 2.6 GHz dual-core Opteron in a low-voltage version (which is an expensive part, not relatively cheap like the normal 95-watt Opteron). The Xeon 5150 costs $690 in 1,000-unit quantities. The Xeon 5140 runs at 2.33 GHz; it has a 65 watt thermal envelope and costs $455, while the Xeon 5130 runs at 2 GHz and costs $316. The Xeon 5120 and 5110 use a 1.07 GHz front side bus and run at 1.87 GHz and 1.6 GHz, respectively, and cost $256 and $209. While Gelsinger was happy that Intel could pull the Woodcrest launch forward, to get ahead of the August launch of the "Rev F" next generation of Opterons, a low-voltage implementation of Woodcrest, the 5148 LV, won't be available until the third quarter. This chip has a 40 watt power profile and a 2.33 GHz clock speed; it also uses the faster 1.33 GHz front side bus and is rumored to cost around $520. You can expect that this part will be very popular in cramped blade server configurations where heat is an issue.

Gelsinger said that the Woodcrest chips would be particularly appealing to customers who are power-sensitive and who nonetheless want to have performance, which he said was about half of the customers who buy X64 servers. This was many of the same customers that AMD and its server partners have been appealing to with their Opteron machines. But to prove that the Woodcrest servers can best whatever AMD can sell today, Gelsinger showed a benchmark based on SunGard's financial simulation software running on a Bensley box and an Opteron-based Sun Fire X4200--each with the same 8 GB of main memory and the same disk drives. On that test, the Bensley machine using the Woodcrest chip was able to process 2,472 simulations per minute and burned about 250 watts doing do, or about 9.9 simulations per watt. The Sun Fire box burned about 270 watts and could only process about 1,809 simulations per minute, which worked out to 6.7 simulations per watt. That gives the Bensley/Woodcrest machine a 47 percent better performance per watt.

"This is unquestionably the best product," said Gelsinger. "It's not just a little ahead--it is way ahead. 1.5X is not just one generation ahead, but a couple." He said that Intel would keep the heat on Intel, too, and that the current Bensley boxes would be able to support the current Dempsey and Woodcrest dual-core chips as well as the future "Clovertown" 65 nanometer four-core chips, due in early 2007; they would also support future dual-core and quad-core chips using 45 nanometer processes, and the chips using Intel's next-generation micro architecture, which is expected in 2008. "We will not only sustain leadership, but increase leadership over this horizon," he said.

About 150 server makers have certified the Woodcrest processor in some 200 configurations, and Intel expects the Woodcrest launch to be the fastest product ramp in its history.

But, the fact remains, that the Opteron Rev F chips are just around the corner, and next year, AMD will also move to 65 nanometer processes, making all kinds of mischief possible.

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