Buried deep within Intel’s new Xeon announcement is an interesting piece of irony. You can now save power by consolidating machines and you can boost performance with new machines, but if you’re just buying a new server you can’t necessarily get big gains in performance and slash power.

Granted, by reducing the number of servers through virtualization you can always save power. But the speed of the clock—basically how fast the entire machine will process data—is the determining factor as to how much power a Xeon server will actually use. At 3.46GHz—a frequency that most of us never expected to see again—the chip will draw up to 130 watts. At 2.66GHz, it will draw 80 watts. And there is a vague promise of future versions that will run as low as 40 watts.

What makes this intriguing is the series of tradeoffs being made at the enterprise computing level. Now that virtualization has pretty much guaranteed more cores can be utilized—rather than waiting for all applications to be parallelized or threaded to use more cores—performance guarantees are no longer included with each new rev of a chip. You can run more applications on more virtual machines, but you don’t necessarily get more performance with more cores. If software is parallelized, six cores could mean six times the performance—or at least close to that number. With virtual machines, six cores means six applications running on the same machine at the same time, and often at the same speed.

That puts processor makers back on the fast track again—Intel and all of its rivals, including AMD in the enterprise, and ARM and Apple in the portable device world. If they can’t sell lower power—there are always some gains at each new process node, of course—then they have to sell more performance. And they have to figure out ways to save energy elsewhere in the machine—everything from software to the overall package, board layout and in the multiple on/off and sleep states.

Intel bought Wind River at least partly for this reason. You have to wonder who’s next on the acquisition list—and just how far into the electronics supply chain the company and its rivals are willing to reach.

–Ed Sperling

Tags: AMD, ARM, Intel, multicore, virtualization

This entry was posted on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 7:51 am and is filed under Editorial, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.