Quad Xeon 7500-Series Systems

Original Article Date: 2010-08-02 

Quad CPU Intel systems have been around for many years, but I have held off from integrating these solutions as I felt they had little to offer over their direct competition - the quad AMD Opteron solutions that we have been successfully integrating since 2004. The 7300 and 7400 series Xeons that were available in a 4-way configuration were very expensive, and yet were still built upon the 1990s front-side-bus architecture (with its consequent bottlenecks).

The recent launch of the 7500 series Xeons, however, shows that Intel have finally broken with the past and brought their 4-way Xeons up to speed with the Nehalem revolution, abandoning the old front-side-bus architecture in favor of the much-superior on-chip memory controller, Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) and 1066MHz DDR3 RAM. Each CPU comes in a beefy 1567-pin package. That's Intel's highest pin count to date, and compares with the 1366-pin count on their 5500/5600 Xeon and Core i7 CPUs.

What's more, is that among the line-up of CPUs available in the 7500-series, there are 4, 6 and 8-core models available. Nowhere else in mainstream x86-based computing do Intel offer an 8-core processor. And with four of these on one mainboard, it is possible to access 32 processor cores in a single box. This is not as high as AMD's 48-core box, but core, for core, Intel with outperform AMD about 2-to-1, so it is possible that the new quad-Xeon systems may be the highest performing x86-based computers available at this time.

The 7500-Series Model Line-Up

Intel have a pretty diverse line-up of models making up the new 7500-series. Choose from 4, 6 or 8-cores, 1.86GHz to 2.66GHz clock, 12MB to 24MB cache and 95W to 130W TDP.

Impressive Benchmark Scores

As discussed above, because of their new Nehalem-based architecture and high-core availabililty, the performance on the new 7500-series Xeons is expected to be very high. This is expectation is met, at least as far as the SPEC multi-core arithmethic benchmarks go.

The graph shows that on integer-based computing, the 8-core X7560 and X7550 Xeons out-performed the fastest 6100-series Opteron (6174 at 2.2GHz) in a 4-way head-to-head, and are just over double the performance of the fastest Intel dual-processor configuration (2-way X5680 3.33GHz). The X7560 in 4-way configuration is actually the fastest quad-processor SPEC benchmark recorded at this time.

Quad Xeon Systems Now Shipping

We are now shipping three system configurations that are based on 4-way Xeon 7500-series CPUs. They all use the same Supermicro X8QBE-F mainboard, but the BERLIN workstation and PALOMAR tower server models differ slightly in the available graphics options, whilst the ANTARES rack server is available in a 1U or 4U format. 

~

I'm pleased to finally offer a worthwhile quad processor configuration from Intel, after many years of discounting them in favor of AMD solutions. The 7500-series Xeons won't win any awards for price-performance - that crown still rests with AMD and their 6100-series 4-way Opterons. But if you're needing out-and-out raw single-box multi-core power, then the new 4-way Xeon systems should fit the bill.

Best regards,

Ben Ranson
Chief Systems Engineer
Electronics Nexus
http://elnexus.com
ben@elnexus.com
1-877-773-5366