Intel forces server chums to fend for themselves

Have you heard about Tukwila?

By Ashlee Vance in Shanghai • Get more from this author

Posted in Servers, 3rd April 2008 10:02 GMT

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IDF Server aficionados were left wanting at this year's China-flavored Intel Developer Forum. The company kept banging on and on and on about something called a MID, which is neither a PDA nor an ultra mobile PC. The important difference between a MID and something else, according to Intel, is new usage models.

Whatever. They're not 128-way SMPs, so we don't care – except over on HardReg where we do.

Intel's server chip chief Pat Gelsinger did make an appearance here where he re-summarized several months of announcements. In addition, Gelsinger clocked customers and partners with a monkey stick and showed off Tukwila – the upcoming addition to Intel's Drunken Uncle processor line – for the first time. It ran Solaris on top of Red Hat.

With Intel spending all of its time playing with toys, it was up to the partners to do the dirty work.

The FPGA co-processor lads from XtremeData were here. You can see their tri-chip blasting through a batch of Black Scholes.

Shot of XtremeData's FPGA unit with Black Schoels score in background

Take that Black Scholes

Gear from former AMD CTO Fred Weber's shop MetaRAM was all over the place as well. Everywhere we turned, someone wanted to shove a double-stuffed Hynix DIMM at us.

This board shows off MetaRam's DDR3 play with Intel's upcoming "Thurley" platform that will use the Nehalem chips.

Double-stuffed Thurley

And again.

Woman holding another Hynix MetaRAM system

The touch, the feel of MetaRAM

We'd tell you all about the fantastic other server gear, but sadly, everything else was pretty bog standard. So, we'll leave you with heatsink porn courtesy of Dynatron.