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Supermicro New Zealand
Merry Christmas & Intel Tylersburg Roadmap
22 December 2008
Intel has officially released the Single Socket Tylersburg in November 2008 and has planned to release Dual Socket Tylersburg in February 2009. What is Tylersburg? And how would they affect our rollout planning?
What is Tylersburg?
Tylersburg is an Intel chipset that implements a new architecture. It differs from the previous architecture in 2 major aspects.
- It no longer utilises a Front Side Bus because it does not act as a relay between the CPU and memory. In lieu of the Front Side Bus, Intel has implemented a new serial link called Quick Path Interconnect for connecting the chipset to the CPU. The same QPI is also used for inter-connecting multiple socket processors.
- It implements 36 lanes of PCI Express version 2 in the North Bridge and 6 lanes of PCI Express version 1.1 in the South Bridge.
The single socket Tylersburg has been renamed X58 as a continuation of the existing X38 and X48 naming convention.
Obviously, Tylersburg does not work with the current range of Intel processors whether they are Xeon or the Core 2. Tylersburg supports a new series of processors that Intel is positioning at the top end. The single socket version is called Bloomfield and the dual socket version is called Nehalem. These processors have integrated memory controllers and each processor has 3 channels of 128bit width for DDR3 memory.
Rollout Planning
Intel has released 3 single socket processor models. They are the Core i7 965, 940 and 920. They are all quad cores with 8MB of L3 cache (this did not exist for Core 2 Quad or Dual processors) and a TDP of 130W. According to an Intel marketing brochure for Q4 of 2008, Intel positioned these top end processors for gamers and not for business use. Considering the price of the new processor, new chipset motherboard and new DDR3 memory, we have the opinion that Core i7 is not yet the sweet spot for business purchasing plans at this stage. We expect Intel to release further Core i7 models with a TDP (Thermal Design Power) rating lower than 130W and lower pricing in Q1 of 2009 and we will review the position again. Our recommendation is to stay with the existing architecture for Q1. Our platform name is X7SBE or X7SBi where X7 stands for the current generation of processors, S stands for Single Processor, B stands for Blackford generation of chipset and E or "i" implies SAS or RAID is implemented with add-on cards. The new architecture platform is available on request.
The Dual socket-based Tyslersburg will turn up in the February 2009 timeframe. As for the single processor situation, we expect the initial release to extend the performance reach and will be more suitable for applications that push the envelope than servers providing stable services to a network of users. We will report in March of the latest developments. The current platform X7DBE is still our recommendation. D stands for dual processor.
Merry Christmas
Editor
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Supermicro New Zealand
Managed by Compucon New Zealand
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