Re: Status of Intel's Common System Interconnect ?
- From: johnwallace4@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:16:58 -0700 (PDT)
On Oct 13, 6:52 pm, JF Mezei <jfmezei.spam...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
johnwalla...@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I'm not 100% sure I'm up to date either, but if I recall correctly,
CSI-based systems require Nehalem (x86-64) or Tukwila (IA64) chips.
The question is whether Tukwila requires CSI or whether HP can have have
its own proprietary chipset. As I recall, HP has had its own chipset for
a while. (then again, if they shipped all their chip designers to Intel,
perhaps they don't have that capability anymore).
floating around (be it HP or anyone else) will likely either be
covered by NDA and subject to change, or be content-free. Examples to
the contrary most welcome.
Ok, so the answer to my question should have been "the information has
not been made public yet" instead of "any 9 year old could look it up by
searching X and Y on the HP.com web site".
Realistically, what does CSI buy anyone anyway that HyperTransport
hasn't offered for years (and before that there was its close relative
the EV7 bus...).
AMD may now lag intel in raw CPU horsepower, but they still have
hypertransport advantage. With CSI, Intel catches up on that aspect of
system performance. And it will allow the 8086 to scale to much larger
systems.
For most purposes an entry or
mid-range Itanium (the "volume market" ones) offers no features I can
see that a suitable Proliant hasn't offered for years,
Do 8086 based servers have the equivalent of the management console card
that gives telnet/terminal access to the system firmware prompts ?
Also, HP's 8086 servers are BIOS based. You would need to buy an Apple
server to get an EFI console.
If CSI does catch on for both x86-64 and IA64,
I don't think there is a neeed for "IF" in there. The market will
consume whatever Intel produces for the 8086. CSI should propagate down
the chain of systems and eventually reach laptops. (for intel based
machines, of course)
interesting questions to answer (again) about whether VMS still needs
VMS-specific system hardware, and that will inevitably lead right back
to why it needs a VMS-specific CPU architecture...
These questions are no longer relevant. As long as HP refuses to discuss
porting VMS beyond IA64, the assumption is that VMS dies with IA64, just
like MPE and Tru64 died when their platform stopped being developped.
Can you get remote management for Proliant? Aboslutely, been around in
one form or another for many years. It started life as an add-in board
but these days it's just another chip on the server motherboard. It's
had various names such as "Remote Insight" or in later versions
"Integrated Lights Out". Think of an IP KVM addon (with the capability
of being on a secure management LAN), but integrated into the server.
I'm afraid you'll have to de-hype the CPQ/HP material somewhat but the
current version seems more than adequate for most purposes, though the
serial console equivalent is still being worked on. These days the
hardware and basic functionality is typically bundled in the server
price, advanced functionality is a £200 add-on. The Integrity product
has the same iLO name, I have no idea whether it is the same product,
same functionality, or same pricing.
Can you get EFI for Proliant? Well you seem to be able to boot OSX,
which seemingly requires EFI, but that's a bit of a hack, just for
fun. For business use in the multiprocessor 64bit world surely it can
only be a matter of time before EFI becomes a supported option.
Windows 2008 and Vista SP1 already support EFI on x86-64, and AMI
(y'know, the commodity BIOS people) were showing it at IDF, so... wait
and see?
Will CSI really catch on? That may depend on whether it works right,
and whether it adds value as well as cost (if it *saves* cost, so much
the better). Actually I'm not as confident as you are, but the chances
of success are high. Intel do have market failures from time to time,
even in the x86 world, e.g. their in-house graphics have traditionally
been laughable. As for CSI enabling scalability to bigger systems: you
can already get a 32core 256GB Proliant based on Opteron, and even the
Xeon one already does 16 cores and 256GB. Do many sensible people
really want/need more than that? Some do, but...
There's not much you can't do on a decent Proliant, apart from run VMS
native (or run HP-UX). There's a reason they really have been *the*
industry standard server for years. There used to be a nice realtively-
low-hype CPQ whitepaper on the technologies and history that make a
proper Proliant a proper server but I can't find either my saved
version or a current one, which is a shame, as it would make a feature
for feature comparison between x86-64 and IA64 so much easier.
The Proliant family brochure does refer to Integrity for mission
critical capabilities (and even mentions VMS): go to www.hp.com/go/proliant
and then for the family brochure, click on "HP Proliant Family Guide"
on the right. It also suggests that Proliants are quite good at
business-critical, and plenty of happy customers would agree in
hardware terms, even if they are somewhat constrained by only having
x86 OSes to choose from.
This message was brought to you by... someone who's seen Proliants as
well as VAXes, Alphas, and a bit of Integrity. I'm doing different
things now, but Proliants don't look to have changed that much since I
last looked properly (that's one of the things that their customers
like, compatibility and investment protection).
.
- Follow-Ups:
- Re: Status of Intel's Common System Interconnect ?
- From: already5chosen
- Re: Status of Intel's Common System Interconnect ?
- Prev by Date: Re: Using an Infoserver
- Next by Date: Re: MX list revival
- Previous by thread: Re: Status of Intel's Common System Interconnect ?
- Next by thread: Re: Status of Intel's Common System Interconnect ?
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
