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Jun. 14, 2010
Hewlett-Packard says it will soon start offering AMD's 12-core "Magny-Cours" new Opteron 6100 CPUs
in its new rackmount and tower servers in about two weeks from now.
In addition to AMD's Opteron 6100 processor, HP was quick to point out that it will still offer Intel in
its ProLiant servers featuring the now popular Nehalem-EX Xeon 7500 family of CPUs.
The Intel Xeon 7500s and AMD's new Opteron 6100s were both launched in March, along with the quad-core
Tukwila Itanium 9300s, but HP has taken more time getting these servers to market, focusing more on getting
the 6-core Westmere-EP Xeon 5600s into existing ProLiant servers.
The workhorses in the new server lineup are the Proliant DL-385 G7, a two-socket box using the Opteron
6100s, and the DL-380 G7, which is a two-socket machine using Xeon 5600s. The Xeon 5600s go into existing
ProLiant servers that were designed for last year's Nehalem-EP Xeon 5500s, which pretty much single-handedly
revived server sales in 2009.
The Opteron 6100s plug into AMD's G-34 socket and use AMD's own chipset - the SR-56X I/O hub and the SP-5100
southbridge - which can support two or four sockets in a single system image.
Both are available in the 2U form factor with room for 16 x 2.5-inch or 6 x 3.5-inch drives. The new DL-380
G7 can have a dozen Intel Xeon cores and 192 GB of RAM, 18 memory slots in total give you 144 GB using 8 GB
sticks, and to hit 192 GB, you have to use a dozen 16 GB sticks and leave six slots empty.
The DL-385 G7 tops out at 24 cores and has 24 memory slots, for a maximum of 256 GB. Again, you can get up
to 192 GB using 8 GB DIMMs with the AMD chipset, but the Opteron 6100's on-chip memory controller can only
address 128 GB max, so if you put 16 GB sticks in the DL-385 G7, you only use 16 of the 24 memory slots to
top out at 256 GB for the server.
Also, HP is now offering a new 1U ProLiant DL-165 G7 lower-budget Opteron 6100 server, which has fewer
expansion slots and only supports four large or eight smaller hard drives.
Some HP vendors are now a bit annoyed at HP for taking so long in getting new servers into the field,
but HP was clearly looking at its supply chain of parts and order backlog and pipeline, and optimizing for
revenue.
Nevertheless, HP still knocked out IBM of the top revenue spot in the server segment thanks to its
ProLiant line, and that's something that no other server maker has done in 35 years.
According to sources familiar with HP's plans for later this month, the ProLiant lineup is not just
getting refreshed with a few new Xeon 5600 servers and the two new Xeon 7500 machines, and the quad-socket
ProLiant DL-580 and the eight-socket DL-980, but there is a new rack and two new blade servers using the
Opteron 6100s coming down the pipeline as well.
Rumor now has it that the four-socket DL-585 will be refreshed in two to three weeks with the Opteron 6100s
and AMD chipsets. It's likely that these newer servers will look very much like the 4U DL-580 G7 using Xeon
7500s but with different CPUs and memory slots.
Some vendors now expect the DL-585 G7 to have 4 sockets supporting a maximum of 48 cores and 48 memory
slots for a maximum of 512 GB because of the on-chip memory controllers.
That's about double the CPU and memory capacity of the four-socket DL-585 G6 that is based on the six-core
Istanbul Opteron 8400 processors that HP started building in April 2009.
Such a basic server is expected to have five PCI-Express 2.0 slots, expandable to 11 using optional mezzanine
expander risers, just like the Xeon 7500-based DL-580 G7.
However, and just to be perfectly clear, the scalability-limit issues with Opterons are still there.
You're still at 48 cores and 512 GB of memory, maximum. And Intel's Xeon 7500s are scaling further on memory —
which is more important on many physical workloads than CPU cores or threads. So Intel still appears to have
a leg up AMD, at least for now.
Source: Hewlett-Packard.
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