CPU roadmap: server processors
Published: 16 Jun 2008
In the other corners...
All of the leading server vendors (HP, Dell, IBM and Sun Microsystems) use Intel's Xeon and Itanium processors in their products. Moreover, in the last few years most of these vendors have also embraced AMD's chips, selling Opteron alongside Xeon products with a high degree of success — particularly to run Linux. However, IBM and Sun (together with partner Fujitsu) both continue to develop their own in-house processors, primarily for use in more specialised server, minicomputer and mainframe platforms.
IBM was arguably the first vendor to ship a multi-core chip, releasing the RISC based dual-core POWER4 back in 2000. Used in iSeries, pSeries and other proprietary IBM systems, development of the POWER (Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC) platform has continued with the latest incarnation, the 65nm POWER6 — a dual-core chip released in May 2007 for use in up to 8-way systems.
IBM's POWER6 is a 64-bit dual-core processor with 790 million transistors running at up to 4.7GHz, with 8MB of on-chip Level 2 cache.
A POWER7 processor is also in development, as part of a 4-year US DARPA (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency) contract awarded to IBM in 2006. Few details are available, but the new chip has been rumoured to be plug-compatible with the AMD Opteron (although this is not confirmed by IBM) and likely to appear around 2010.
As well as selling Intel/AMD powered x86 servers, Sun has also been experimenting with its own multi-core technology for a number of years. Its latest processors are the UltraSPARC T2 (originally codenamed Niagara 2) designed for use in single-socket rack and blade servers and the UltraSPARC T2 Plus (Victoria Falls) recently released (April 2008) for use in 2-way servers. Both are 65nm 8-core processors with a pair of on-board 10Gbps Ethernet ports and integrated cryptographic capabilities. A 16-core processor (Rock) is also in development for use in SMP servers with an expected 2009 ship date.
Sun's UltraSPARC T2 is an eight-core processor manufactured on a 65nm process.
Finally, it's worth noting that although systems powered by Sun UltraSPARC and IBM POWER processors have well-established niche markets, the chips themselves tend not to be adopted by other manufacturers. That honour goes to Intel and AMD who, between them, have the lion's share of the server and HPC processor markets. Moreover, that dominance continues to grow with increasing adoption of Opteron by the top vendors plus a recently announced joint Intel/Cray development initiative that will see even Cray supercomputers powered by industry-standard Xeon silicon in the future.
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