Performance of Intel Xeon 7400 Processors Limited by Windows OS

As you probably already know, Intel's first 6-core processors, codenamed “Dunnington,” have been officially launched yesterday, following a couple of months of anticipation. Along with the release of the new Xeon processors, a number of server systems manufacturers are expected to reveal their own systems, powered by them. These chips are believed to provide an incredible new level of performance for today's high-end server systems, especially in the increasingly important field of virtualization.

 

In addition to announcing the new products, Intel has also revealed details about several performance records achieved by servers systems running on a four-socket and eight-socket configuration. Aside from the PRIMERGY RX600 S4 server designed by Fujitsu-Siemens, of which we told you about yesterday, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell are also expected to reveal their new server systems powered by Intel's Xeon 7400 processor series.

 

Another systems vendor, Unisys, has also announced the ES7000 Model 7600R Enterprise Server, which is based on a 16-socket configuration, and provides an amazing number of 96 processor cores. The Blue Bell, Pennsylvania systems vendor said that it demonstrated the consolidation of 64 SQL Server databases into a single-four socket, Xeon 7400 processor configuration, running with 24 processor cores. What this actually means is that business customers now have the opportunity of scaling back a conventional “commodity server farm” of 64 single-socket or dual-socket Xeon processor servers into a single server configuration.

 

However, there is a downside to the 96 processor cores configuration, as Microsoft's Windows OS has a limited support, for up to 65-core environments. “Because Microsoft Windows operating system support is limited to a 64-core environment, within a single OS instance, we'll support up to 64 cores,” said Colin Lacey, a Unisys marketing vice president. “You'd actually have 96 cores physically within the system. But then you would disable two cores in each socket. So you'd actually be running these sockets at four active cores each (out of six).”

 

Lacey said that he believed this limitation to be rectified in the future, but, until that happened, he was of the opinion that there wouldn't be an important demand for 96-core server configurations, as most customers out there are likely to go for a smaller number of cores. Lacey also added that this limitation was not an issue with Linux-based server systems.