HP revs up Integrity, Superdomes for Itanium 9500s
Several new leases on life, with an option to buy
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Now that Intel's "Poulson" Itanium 9500 processors are out and Oracle is supporting its database on HP-UX 11i v3 running atop those processors, HP CEO Meg Whitman has two fewer things to worry about. The life of Ric Lewis, the new general manager of the Business Critical Systems division who took over that job late last week, is a whole lot easier, as well – now BCS can get back to peddling Itanium-based servers and boosting HP's bottom line.
The Itanium 9500s were launched on Thursday at a double-whammy event that featured Intel execs and OEM partners in the first half, and HP's BCS top brass and customers in the second half. Intel wanted to not only show off its new eight-core chip, which offers somewhere between two and three times the performance of the prior quad-core "Tukwila" Itanium 9300 processors, but also to emphasize that HP is not the only vendor peddling Itanium-based systems. (El Reg will do a separate story on the machines being put together by Inspur, Bull, Hitachi, and NEC.)
HP, for its part, wanted to show that the Itanium processor has some life, with a roadmap going years into the future. They also wanted folks to know that Intel's common platform strategy – with future Xeons and Itaniums sharing common elements on the die as well as common chip packaging, sockets, chipsets, and I/O – meshed nicely with its "Project Odyssey" effort to converge the high-end ProLiant Xeon servers with Integrity and possibly Superdome systems somewhere down the line.
But that's a problem for two to three years from now.
On Thursday, what HP wanted to talk about was the upgrades it has made to its entry and midrange Integrity servers, which run HP-UX, NonStop, and OpenVMS, and its high-end Superdome 2 machines, which run HP-UX.
Rather than just drop the Itanium 9500s into the existing machines, HP has done a number of tweaks to create new system boards to take advantage of new features in the Itanium 9500s as well as in its HP-UX software stack.
The hardware changes are not as dramatic as the shift from traditional rack and cabinet machines that HP did in April 2010 when it incorporated the Itanium 9300s, "bladed up" the Integrity and Superdome 2 machines, and left a token rx Series rack server in the mix for customers with modest OpenVMS workloads. These rack nodes are also used to build NonStop fault tolerant clusters.
Ric Lewis, new GM of HP's BCS division
"I am willing to bet that everybody in this room has touched an Integrity system today," Lewis declared at the Poulson launch event. "You may not know it, but you are using them all the time."
That's because some of the largest financial networks employ Itanium-based servers in one form or another, as do most of the Fortune 100. Now that we live in a world where computing and networking are ubiquitous, it's funny how we want to bank or shop wherever we are and whenever we feel like it.
That compulsion, explained Lewis, is driving up demand for systems that support mission-critical workloads. Lewis did not explicitly say that it was driving up demand for Integrity and Superdome systems, but he sure wanted to imply it. And, just to be absolutely clear, HP is perfectly happy for you to buy either a Xeon server running Windows or Linux or an Itanium server running HP-UX, OpenVMS, or NonStop.
"We're not going to push an architecture on customers," Lewis explained. "It is really a 'both/and' play." He said that HP was "full speed ahead" on future Itanium server development – but honestly, if it takes between two and three years to get the Kittson upgrade to Poulson into the field, as Intel implied it would, then perhaps it is more accurate to say it is the fullest speed ahead that's possible under the circumstances, and one that still gives a lot of the advantage to Xeons, as has been the case for the past decade.
If you are an existing HP-UX customer running these machines, the good news is that HP is going to give you machines at about the same price using the Poulsons as you paid for systems using the Tukwilas.
Intel says that in its internal benchmarks on a variety of commercial workloads that matter for Itanium, the eight-core Poulson are seeing somewhere between 2 and 2.4 times the performance of a quad-core Tukwila chip. But HP says it can do better than that, thanks to software tuning. "We have systems in the labs that are significantly above 3X," bragged Lewis. So you could get something on the order of three times the bang for the buck.
HP charges for HP-UX on a per-socket basis, and El Reg checked with Kate O'Neill, director of global product marketing for the BCS division, and there are no changes in HP-UX software licensing fees between the Tukwila and Poulson machines. So there isn't a big software upgrade fee waiting for you as the core count doubles.
IBM, by contrast, licenses its AIX, IBM i, and z/OS operating systems and DB2 database software by core, so even when you get more performance in the hardware for the same price, you get truly hammered with the software bill. Oracle, by the way, uses core pricing for databases and per-machine licenses for Solaris and Linux.
Next page: Updated Integrity
COMMENTS
Re: Well.....
You've gotta be kidding Matt.
Yes, I've also seen the HP sales manual for how to sell against POWER, that what you get from partnering with everyone. That doesn't mean that it's right.
Do you seriously think that a 8 socket Poulson Blade with limited IO, limited Memory, can compete against a POWER7+ based POWER 770/780 with 16 sockets, fullblown IO and Memory ? And hotswap of everything ?
That is in Kebabbert territory of fanboiship. You should know better.
I think the HP Poulson blades looks like a solid product, but it's not remotely in a position to compete against POWER 770 or 780's.
Now I have no doubt that the bl890 i4 will be able to beat the PS704 blade, but again that is a 2.4GHz POWER7 system, in a form factor that I would never use for enterprise computing.
And you say it yourself.. partitioning... POWER stopped doing partitioning back in 2005. You know ... it's kind of a bugger to claim that you have the best moped, when trying to win a race against someone in race car. Nobody ... except SUN and HP talk about partitioning anymore... and HP does actually have a decent virtualization option.
come on....
// Jesper
Re: Well.....
"L3 cache."
You do understand why the Itanium implementation of an EPIC architecture needs large caches to generally perform well right ? And caches that are much larger than for example x86 and RISC's.
You do understand that the fact that you try to claim hilarious things like "And IBM does not have good cache hit ratios as Intel so the faster SRAM is even better in practice.", (in the context of Itanium) shows that you don't really understand the whole idea behind Itanium ?
RTFM Matt, my first compile and testing of Itanium was in January 2001, on an Intel 'whitebox'. And I've been using the architecture on and off since then.
Again
Merced 1 core 800 Mhz 0MB L3 cache 0 MB L3 cache per core
McKinley 1 core 900 MHz 1.5MB cache 1.5MB L3 cache per core
McKinley 1 core 1 GHz, 3MB cache 3 MB L3 cache per core
Madison 1 core 1.5 GHz, 6MB cache 6 MB L3 cache per core
Madison 1 core 1.67 GHz, 9MB cache 9 MB L3 cache per core
Montecito/Montvale 2 cores 1.66 GHz, 24 MB L3 cache 12 MB L3 cache per core
Tukwila 4 cores 1.73 GHz 24 MB L3 cache 6 MB L3 cache per core
Poulson 8 cores 2.53 GHz 32 MB L3 cache 4 MB L3 cache per core.
So basically the amount of L3 cache that is in Poulson brings us back to the day of McKinley, in the L3 per core ratio. And furthermore Poulson uses HW multithreads, which makes it even worse, in comparison to for example Madison.
For comparision POWER7+ has 80MB L3 cache, which is actually very clevery divided into two parts a local and a 'not so local', which speeds up access of 10MB of the L3 cache per core.
And last rumours has it that haswell will using eDRAM,
"No, all frequencies quoted for IBM CPUs are from IBM brochures."
Nice attempt at ducking.
"Well, using the phrase "up to 4.1GHz" doesn't sound very guaranteed!"
You are simply not making sense. You are mixing thing up, purposely misinterpreting numbers and drawing conclusion that have nothing to do with reality.
It's very simple. A 8 core 4.1GHz POWER7+ processor will run flat out at 4.1GHz on all cores if you provide provide load for all cores, and provide the cooling and airflow specified in the manuals.
If you specify in the energy policy for the system that the system should optimize energy usage over performance the system will do so. Including the cores, hence it will put cores and processors for that matter into states that uses less energy if there isn't load enough to provide work for these cores processors, IO slots whatever.
If you specify in the energy policy for the system that it should prioritize performance over energy usage it will try to boost the frequency of the cores when it's needed.
If you are using a POWER7 system booted up in TurboCore, mode, the cores that are activated will run at a boosted frequency rather than the normal frequency all the time, there will be no aditional frequency boost available, according to the manual.
Actually it's much like what Intel is doing with it's Xeon processors. It's actually pretty simple.. or at least for everyone else than you.
// Jesper
Re: Well.....
"It's still not "3-4x" as claimed by the other IBM troll, though"
Power 7+ has 80 MB across 8 cores. Poulson will have 20-33 MB across 8 cores... or 25% to 41% that of Power 7+. I suppose it is technically 2.42-4x the amount of L3 cache, but, point being, a ton more than Poulson.
"So IBM gurantee you will have all eight cores spining at 4.1GHz?"
The IBM data sheet has four procs in the 770 CECs at 4.42 GHz. Again though, we are talking miles apart. Call it 4.4, 4.1, 3.8.... much faster than anything Poulson can provide is the point. You are splitting hairs to determine if P7+ is much faster or much, much faster than Poulson. If you determine it is much faster, is that some sort of victory for Poulson? The highest clock speed even *claimed* by HP is 2.53 Ghz... probably subject to the same thermal caveats you claim to be true for Power. Power 7+ fully clocked down will still be considerably faster than Poulson top bin.
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