Analysis on the competitive landscape of IBM, HP and Sun's new generation minicomputers (1)

A minicomputer Small Computer) often gives a very high sense. In fact, from the development history of computing, Minicomputers are indeed more qualified, and the operating systems and processors used are also more advanced, so minicomputers have another name-UNIX server. This year is a big year for minicomputers, also known as UNIX servers. This is because the traditional minicomputers, IBM and HP, have launched a new generation of products this year, based on the POWER7 processor released by IBM in September February and the anteng 9300 codenamed Tukwila) processor released by intel in the same period. Sun, another big factory, has been exhausted by Oracle's purchase. In fact, Sun's family has withdrawn from the competition for a new generation of minicomputers this year. Among them, IBM's Minicomputers are obviously the most famous and dynamic.

In terms of product forms, in the traditional sense, Minicomputers are dominated by exclusive cabinets or rack servers. Blade Minicomputers are a low-end product from a certain perspective, only for high-density production environments, because its scalability is greatly restricted. This time, HP boldly adopted the blade architecture to launch most of its new product models. Only Integrity rx2800 i2 adopts the rack form, even the highest-end Integrity Superdome 2 adopts the proprietary blade form. The newly launched rx9800 i2 and rx9900 i2 can basically be seen as the Assembly products of c3000 and c7000 blade chassis + BL860c i2 ), this design is of revolutionary significance for the minicomputer market, but it is still difficult to say whether it can dispel the user's fear. at least from the perspective of the author, the minicomputer platform that undertakes key business applications appears in the mainstream form of blades. It is indeed necessary for users to make major changes in their usage habits and traditional concepts, this will undoubtedly increase the difficulty of promoting the new generation of HP minicomputers.

CPUStill the focus of user attention

IBM is currently the only vendor that can truly provide large hosts, minicomputers, and general-purpose PC servers. However, if we use a pyramid structure, we can see the importance of minicomputers in IBM server la S, this is also the market for all minicomputers. It fills the gap between low-end x86 servers and the largest large host. To this end, IBM has made unremitting efforts. Taking POWER processor, the representative of Minicomputer's essence and personality, as an example, It has been 20 years since the earliest time to determine the RISC instruction architecture system, it is an important force that cannot be ignored in today's CPU field.

Now we can make a summary of the features of POWER7. The highlights and features of POWER7 extracted by IBM include the following:

TurboCoreMode:It can maximize the performance of the core for database applications, and increase the core frequency by up to 10%.

MaxCoreMode:This mode can be switched with the TurboCore mode. This mode is used when more cores and threads are required to participate in application execution. In MaxCore mode, the running frequency of the core is not as high as that of the TurboCore mode, but it has the most cores and threads, which is very suitable for highly parallel applications and high-performance computing.

Intelligent threadIntelligent Thread):Intelligent switching between 1/2/4 threads can be performed based on the load of the workflow to ensure optimal running efficiency.

Intelligent CacheIntelligent Cache):The hybrid L3 cache structure allows the core to make full use of the cache space and optimize access between the core and core.

Intelligent Energy Consumption OptimizationIntelligent Energy Optimization):To maximize performance, or to minimize the energy consumption of the processor when the heat dissipation conditions permit.

Active memory expansionActive Memory Expansion):When there is a need for an application, such as an sap erp application), the existing memory data is compressed using the memory compression technology to free up physical memory space, up to 50% of the memory capacity can be effectively expanded, therefore, users can save 50% of the memory capacity cost when deploying related applications.

Solid State DiskSolid State Drives):The POWER7 system fully supports solid state disks to optimize I/O access speeds and further accelerate I/O access-sensitive applications. The main feature of Cert 9300 is to fully introduce the QPI direct connection architecture, and integrate the memory controller, so it has switched from the SMP architecture to the NUMA architecture), that is, to fully introduce the non-Core un-Core of the Nehalem architecture) i/O is designed with hyper-threading (HT) capabilities. Each processing core processes two threads simultaneously. Since the unCore I/O part is basically the same as the Nehalem-EX design, it can be shared with Nehalem-EX on the platform level, but the number of pins is not the same. The anteng 9300 is LGA1248, nehalem-EX is LGA1567. As for the cache design, the changes with the previous generation of anteng are not obvious.