The xSeries 450, which IBM launched in early May after a few months delay as Intel was working through some bugs in the McKinley predecessors to the Madisons, is also based on the Summit-II chipset. From the get-go, the Summit family of chipsets were designed to have a high degree of commonality (about 85% according to IBM sources) when modified for supporting either 32-bit Pentium or 64-bit Itanium processors. IBM stopped shipments on the xSeries 450s, but now that Madison is out and doesn’t have the bug, it says it will resume shipments of the boxes on July 18.
The first Summit machine was code-named Vigil, and it was sold under the name xSeries 440. It supported the 32-bit Foster Xeon MP processors, which topped out at 1.6GHz, and the initial Gallatin Xeon MP processors, which topped out at 2GHz. The xSeries 440 debuted as a four-way box in March 2002, and as the year progressed, IBM made available the Summit chipset’s four scalability ports, which allow NUMA clustering of four-ways to create servers with 8, 12, or 16 processors in a single system image.
The Summit-II chipset, according to Jay Bretzmann, manager of product marketing for the xSeries line, is a higher performing chipset, with lower cache memory latencies than its predecessor. Depending on the workload, the cache latencies for a running set of applications can be anywhere from 5% to 15% lower, and this can translate into a lot more performance with processors cycling at many gigahertz. The Summit-II chipset also has support for hot swap/hot add main memory, which is very cool.
In the 32-bit version, the Summit-II servers will be sold using the xSeries 445 designation. While the existing xSeries 440 machines will support the faster 2GHz, 2.5GHz, and 2.8GHz Gallatin chips Intel announced yesterday in conjunction with the Madison Itaniums, IBM is going to be encouraging customers with xSeries 440 machines to move to the xSeries 445 so they can wring all the extra performance possible out of the Gallatin chips they buy. Initially, the xSeries 445 will be available in configurations with 4, 8, or 16 processors, just like the xSeries 440 was. But late in 2003, IBM will announce a 32-way configuration of this machine, as it has been hinting it would do since late last year. The xSeries 445 servers with 4, 8, and 16 processors will support any of the three Gallatin clock speeds above, but Bretzmann says that IBM will probably only ship the 32-way configuration of the xSeries 445 with the 2.8GHz version of the Gallatin processor.
The xSeries 445 is a rack-mountable machine that fits into a 4U rack-mounted chassis. It supports up to 64GB of main memory, which is the practical limit on 32-bit machines with up to 16 processors (4GB per processor is all a 32-bit machine can do). The base xSeries 445 will sell for $18,599 and is available today.
IBM doesn’t have to launch a successor to the four-way Itanium-based xSeries 450 server, with it being only two months old and offering support for Madison processors immediately. The McKinley and Madison processors were designed to plug into the exact same processor slots and present essentially the same heat and electric profile to the servers. The 1.5GHz Madison has more cache and a higher clock speed, but uses a more dense chip technology so it doesn’t act much differently in terms of heat or electric use than the 1GHz McKinleys. An xSeries 450 with a single 1.3GHz Madison processors, 1GB of main memory, and no disk will sell for $25,999.
IBM did not, however, have a two-way Itanium server, and has fixed that shortcoming in its xSeries product line with the xSeries 382. Like everybody else, IBM says that the two-way, 2U Madison machine that it is selling will be particularly attractive to HPC customers who want to build Linux clusters from them. But for companies who can find 64-bit versions of their applications and databases in Windows or Linux, the xSeries 382 and xSeries 450 are going to offer good performance and excellent value. The xSeries 382 will be available starting on August 20, and a base machine with two 1.5GHz Madisons, 4GB of main memory, and two 73GB SCSI disks will sell for $26,589.
Like all the other Intel OEMs, IBM also announced that it would be supporting the faster Gallatin processors in other non-Summit lines. Customers will not have to upgrade their rack or tower boxes to take advantage of the higher-performing Gallatins. Specifically, the xSeries 255 and xSeries 360 servers (four-way machines) will support the new Gallatins. IBM is also now shipping the 3.06GHz Prestonia Pentium 4 Xeon DP processors in its xSeries 205 and xSeries 225 two-way servers.
Itanium-based machines from IBM require Windows 2003 or the 64-bit implementations of Linux from Red Hat Inc or SuSE AG. Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 is supported on the 32-bit xSeries machines, as are a wide range of Linux distributions and other OSes such as NetWare or SCO UnixWare.
Source: Computerwire
