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 ...

HP has just released TPC-C and TPC-E results for the ProLiant DL380G7 with 2 Xeon 5680 3.33GHz 6-core processor, allowing a direct comparison with their DL385G7 with 2 Opteron 6176 2.3GHz 12-core processors. Last month I complained about the lack of performance results for the Intel Xeon 5600 6-core 32nm processor line for 2-way systems. This ...

It was about time I got a new laptop, and so I made a phone-call to Dell to discuss my options. I decided not to get an SSD from them, because I’d rather choose one myself – the sales guy tells me that changing the HD doesn’t void my warranty, so that’s good (incidentally, I’d love to hear people’s recommendations for which SSD to get for my ...

Intel launched the Xeon 5600 series (Westmere-EP, 32nm) six-core processors on 16 March 2010 without any TPC benchmark results. In the performance world, no results almost always mean bad or not good results. Yet there is every reason to believe that the Xeon 5600 series with six-cores (X models only) will performance exactly as expected for a 50% ...

At Intel Developer Forum 2009 last week, Microsoft disclosed significant advances in Windows Server 2008 R2 with the elimination of many locks, most prominently the Dispatch Scheduler lock, that impact the ability scale performance up to and beyond 64 cores. Look for the presentation: Microsoft & Intel Innovations in Hardware and Software to ...

To date, no 4-way or 8-way TPC-H data warehouse benchmark result has been published for the six-core Xeon X7460 and no TPC-C or TPC-E OLTP benchmark result has been published for six-core Opteron. Usually, the absence of published results means the results are not competitive, in one manner or another. TPC-C, E and H results were published for ...

Earlier, JK blogged and ranted about buying bigger hardware. Let me assure people that talent for highly efficient and scalable (over many processor cores) was drained long ago, and not just from the recent emergence of multi-core processors. For that matter, I am not sure it was ever prevalent because developers built code on small single socket ...