IDF 2012 The details are still a bit sketchy, but Intel is committed to get the rest of the "Ivy Bridge" family of Xeon processors out the door next year, is getting ready to roll out new Itanium and Atom processors for servers this year, and is working on future Xeon E3 and Atom processors for microservers next year, too.
So says Diane Bryant, general manager of the Data Center and Connected Systems Group, which makes chips for servers, storage arrays, and networking gear as well as controlling a number of interconnects Intel has acquired in the past year.
As in years gone by, Intel is starting at the bottom and working its way up through server form factors rather than try to get all of the Ivy Bridge Xeon variants out the door at the same time.
The Xeon E3-1200 v2 processors launched in May were the first Ivy Bridge server chips to come out. In fact, they debuted beside the "Sandy Bridge" Xeon E5-2400 processors for low-cost two-socket machines and the Xeon E5-4600 processors for four-sockets. The workhorse Xeon E5-2600 processors debuted back in March, which has been the traditional time for the two-socket server launch from for the past three years.
But don't get used to that cadence.
Intel really wanted to get the Xeon E5-2600s out the door last fall, and even managed to ship a bunch to supercomputer customers under NDA. And with the Xeon E5-2600s only just beginning to ship in volume during the early summer and Intel not under a huge performance or price/performance threat from AMD, you can bet that Chipzilla will try to sell those Xeon E5-2400, E5-2600, and E5-4600 processors as long as possible, and let that 22-nanometer process used for Ivy Bridge mature even more and thereby increase its profits – or at least maintain them relative to the very mature 32-nanometer process used to etch this generation of Sandy Bridge E5 chips.
During a presentation at Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco on Tuesday, Bryant went over the cloud, HPC, and big data markets that Intel is trying to tap into with its Xeon and Atom server chips, and gave a few details on forthcoming processors in lieu of actual server chip announcements.
However, if you were expecting the eight-core "Poulson" Itanium 9500, the twelve-core "Sandy-Bridge-EX" Xeon E7, or the dual-core "Centerton" Atom to be announced at IDF this week, you were no doubt disappointed.
In fact, there isn't going to be a Sandy Bridge-EX part, Bryant confirmed to El Reg in an interview. The development and qualification cycles for the E7 class of machines is much longer than for the two-socket boxes, and once you get this late into the year, vendors are hesitant to try to introduce a new box that would next year be superseded relatively quickly by an "Ivy Bridge-EX" chip.
"At some point, you have to Sandy Bridge snap back and get back into the cadence," explained Bryant.
As El Reg reported back in May 2011, the Intel plan originally called for the Sandy Bridge-EP, which scales up to four sockets, and the Sandy Bridge-EX, which scales up to eight sockets – or higher with extended chipsets created by the server makers themselves, if they get around to doing it – to plunk into the Socket-R or LGA2011 socket that is one of the sockets supported by the "Romley" server platform and the "Patsburg" C600 chipset.
There was no four-socket Sandy Bridge-EP way back when, but Intel decided (and we think correctly) that a lower-cost four-socket machine based on the E5-4600 was a better option than a full-on Sandy Bridge-EX for many workloads.
The plans also originally called for the new "Brickland" platform and the Ivy Bridge-EX chips to be used in machines with two, four, or eight sockets, much as the ten-core "Westmere-EX" E7-2800, E7-4800, and E7-8800 series are today.
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