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NEC shifts its focus to Intel's new Nehalem CPU

May 15, 2010

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NEC yesterday said it is shifting its focus to Intel's new Nehalem-EX Xeon 7500 CPUs for its largest servers.

NEC was pretty keen on high-end Itanium-based systems for the past 9 to 10 years, while at the same time getting some benchmark wins with its 16-socket Azuza and 32-socket Azama motherboards in the Express 5800 family of processors.

But in an effort to get to market faster and to offer some marked differentiations compared to its rivals building Nehalem-EX computers and servers, Mike Mitsch, general manager for the IT Platform Group at NEC America says that its engineers took some of the best features from the Itanium versions of the Express 5800 server line and ported them over to the new Express 5800 GX series, which uses the Intel Xeon 7500 family of CPUs.

The idea is exactly what El Reg said when the Xeon 7500s were launched: "they're like Itanium, only this time you might actually use them."

The Express 5800 MX computers and servers are cell-based symmetric multiprocessing systems based on 4-socket systems. Each Xeon server chassis has one four-socket cell, and four chassis are lashed together using external SMP links to create a 96-core server, known by the easy-to-remember name Express 5800 / A1160 MX high-end server.

NEC's MX chipset used in the server sports 80 GB per second of bandwidth to link the main and cache memories on the four server nodes into an SMP configuration, and the server holds 1 TB of main memory using 8 GB fully buffered DDR 2 RAM sticks.

The Express 5800 Glueless Xeon GX servers are completely designed by NEC, not developed in conjunction with Unisys like the Monster Xeon MX machines using the four-core and six-core Xeon 7400 processors that were announced almost two years ago.

In the old days, the Monster Xeon server designed by NEC and Unisys but manufactured by NEC supported the four-core and six-core "Dunnington" Xeon 7400 processors, which used the old frontside bus architecture instead of the new QuickPath Interconnect that the Nehalem and now Westmere Xeon chips employ.

The Dunningtons did not support Intel's HyperThreading simultaneous multithreading, either, which means that the server topped out at supporting 64 threads running at 2.4 GHz or 96 threads running at 2.66 GHz.

Rather than take the MX chipset and retrofit it to support the new Xeon 7500 processors with their new sockets and interconnect, NEC decided to instead start from scratch and build a midrange server that gluelessly scales from two to four sockets in a single system.

By doing so, it could get a new server in to the field relatively shortly after the Xeon 7500s were announced. The Xeon 7500s debuted on March 30, and NEC started shipping servers using them on May 5.

On a different but similar note, in the past week, Dell said that its four-socket Xeon 7500 servers, the PowerEdge R 810, R 910, and M 910 started shipping on April 27.

And for its part, IBM's rack and blade servers using the Intel Xeon 7500 chips and Big Blue's ex5 chipset were also rolled out on March 30 and will start shipping on June 25.

Cisco Systems and Silicon Graphics have fielded four-socket Xeon 7500 machines, as well. As we previously reported, Hewlett-Packard is working on its own Nehalem-EX mammoth servers, the four-socket ProLiant 580 and the eight-socket ProLiant 980.

Not wanting to stay on the sidelines either, Oracle is also cooking up its own eight-socket server using the Nehalem chip. Both HP and Oracle are rumored to be getting their servers into the field in the same June timeframe.

There's no question that overall competition in the high-end server segment is rapidly heating up and there appears to be no end in sight for now.

NEC wants to be on the front-end of this Nehalem wave, which is why it went with the glueless GX design instead of re-engineering its older MX design.

The Intel Express 5800 / A1080-a GX server comes in a 7U chassis and is available in 3 different flavors.

The A1080a-S motherboard puts a single four-socket board in the server with a single service CPU. That service processor is one of the key differences between the NEC servers and other Nehalem-EX machines in that it takes the Intelligent QPI BIOS that NEC developed for its older Itanium-based Express 5800 servers.

Itanium was supposed to have QPI features already, and NEC was ready for it even if Intel wasn't almost a year ago.

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Source: Intel.