The arrival of the Sandy Bridge EN and EP processors, expected in early 2012, will mark the completion of a significant shift in Intel server strategy. For the longest time 1995-2009, the strategy had been to focus on producing a premium processor designed for 4-way systems that might also be used in 8-way systems and higher. The objective ...

There has been relatively litle activity in TPC Benchmarks recently with the exception of the raft of Dell TPC-H results with Exa Solutions. It could be that systems today are so powerful that few people feel the need for benchmarks. IBM published an 8-way Xeon E7 (Westmere-EX) TPC-E result of 4593 in August, slightly higher than the Fujitsu ...

Fusion-iO just announced the new ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo on Oct 2011 (at some conference of no importance). The MLC models will be available late November and the SLC models afterwards. See the Fusion-iO press release for more info. Below are the Fusion-IO ioDrive2 and ioDrive2 Duo specifications. The general idea seems to be for the ...

Today, it is actually possible to build a highly capable database system in a laptop form factor. There is no point to running a production database on a laptop. The purpose of this is so that consultants (i.e., me), can investigate database performance issues without direct access to a full sized server. It is only necessary to have ...

IBM just published a TPC-H SF 1000 result for their x3850 X5, 4-way Xeon 7560 system featuring a special MAX5 memory expansion board to support 1.5TB memory. In Dec 2010, IBM also published a TPC-H SF1000 for their Power 780 system, 8-way, quad-core, (4 logical processors per physical core). The figure table below shows TPC-H SF 1000 ...

Fujitsu just published an astounding TPC-E benchmark result of 3,800 tpsE for their 8-way Xeon 7560 system, the Primergy RX900 S1. Fujitsu had previously published a TPC-E result of 2046.96 for their 4-way Xeon 7560 system, the Primergy RX600 S5. The new results shows 85.6% scaling from 4-socket to 8-socket. Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 ...

Revenge, Return of Big Iron. In the old days, standard server systems did not have the power to run large enterprises, hence there were vendors that built really big servers. However it became apparent if not widely publicized that there were serious technical challenges scaling up on big iron systems. (Many of these difficulties have since ...

AMD released information on their upcoming Bulldozer architecture in conjunction with Hotchips 22, of which a less technical version is on the AMD website Bulldozer press release. The slidedeck is at slideshare. The principle new feature is the AMD solution for addressing multi-threaded performance. AMD seems determined not implement the same ...

NEC announced their 8-way server with Intel's Xeon 7500 launch on 30 March 2010, along with a published TPC-E performance benchmark result. The listed availability date was 24 June 2010, so the 5800/A1080a should now be available, although I have not yet ordered a system for my own personal use. Producing a respectable benchmark result for a ...

HP has just announced the ProLiant DL580 G7 and DL980 G7 servers based on the Xeon 7500 series processors, and the DL585 G7 4-way server with the 12-core AMD Opteron 6100 series (Magny-Cours). Apparently the reason for the delay is that the 8-way DL980 G7 employs custom silicon node controllers (XNC), and possibly, so HP could make a splash in ...