Intel or AMD for Bandwidth in 2008?

Competition is a beautiful dynamic of technological evolution. Anyone who's been paying attention to the x86 market place has seen some of the fiercest competition recently between Intel and AMD. This is truly a beautiful thing as now we have two companies that are working aggressively to develop better products and beat the other to the next major technological milestone.

As stated in my last column, the real winners here are the consumers. As both Intel and AMD work to make their products better, faster, and more cost effective the end result is ultimately better products at better prices for the consumers.

One area where we will really appreciate this will be in the bandwidth capabilities of x86-64 systems coming out in late 2007 and through 2008. Although AMD has had a commanding lead in CPU to memory and PCI Express bandwidth, Intel is catching up with a vengeance.

Recently, I have seen several released and soon to be released Intel platforms from multiple vendors. I must say that the early bandwidth performance results have been extremely impressive. In fact, I have already seen some Intel systems running at twice the levels of bandwidth of what I had previously recorded.

What makes this news even more exciting is that these results were observed using shipping Intel processors. This means these great results were seen using processors with external memory controllers. It is reasonable (let's say near certainty) to conclude that the Intel processors of 2008, with integrated memory controllers, will only further increase this bandwidth and hopefully by a healthy margin.

So, my crystal ball tells me that in 2008, we're going to see a number of bandwidth records broken by a large margin. And I'm happy to say that we as consumers will have many systems to choose from to meet even the most demanding of bandwidth needs.

Third I/O intends to demonstrate record setting bandwidth performance once again in 2008. We'll keep you up to date on our results as they are revealed to us.

2007's Highest Bandwidth Server

We live in a world of constant change. This is especially true in technology. Today's post will discuss what I believe to be the highest external bandwidth results ever recorded from a commodity x86-64 server platform. However, with the rapid change of technology, it is safe to say that these results will quickly become dated by newer technologies.

Early in 2007, my company, Third I/O, was fortunate enough to participate in a collaborative benchmark with Emulex and AMD. The goal of our benchmark was to establish the highest realistic external throughput of Fibre Channel from a single server system.

After much research, we decided to run our experiments on an HP DL585G2 as it allowed for an extraordinary number of add-in PCI Express peripherals. In addition, the block level diagram for this board showed that it was capable of some pretty amazing performance.

Long story short, our experiments resulted in 7,964 MB/s of full duplex throughput. This means that data was simultaneously being transferred in and out of the system at this extraordinary data rate.

If you'd like further details, check out the performance brief at:

http://www.emulex.com/white/hba/tio-perfbrief.pdf

In closing, I feel it is only fair to state that this same level of performance would likely be seen on other similarily architected AMD systems. However, based on our research and system availability, the HP DL585G2 was the system chosen and it truly did deliver some amazing results.

What lies ahead in 2008? I believe that this will be an amazing year for high bandwidth systems. Intel has many tricks up their sleeve, including integrated memory controllers in their new processors, but AMD is working on several new high bandwidth architectures as well. In the end, this is very good news for us as consumers.