Ovum: Intel’s six cores better than four

According to analyst firm Ovum, the chips set the stage for a new round of competition between Intel and AMD.

David Mitchell, SVP IT research at Ovum, said the real challenge will be to see whether today's software is able to utilise the computing power and deliver real economic benefits to the CIO.

“Not all software will be able to unlock the huge processor power that the new six-core chips will provide,” he said.

“The announcement, by Unisys, of one of the first machines provides a good example. Unisys announced the ES7000 Model 7600R Enterprise Server on Monday. It is a 16-socket server and so, in theory, it offers a massive 96 cores of processing power.”

According Mitchell the practical problem for CIOs looking to deploy Windows Server on this machine is that Windows only supports 64 cores in a single instance, leaving 32 cores unused.

“Now, it is unlikely that the 64 core limitation, at an operating system level, will remain the issue for long,” he claimed.

“The Linux kernel is already capable of supporting more than 64 cores, as are Solaris and OpenSolaris. The real obstacle to unlocking power will be at the business application level.”

Mitchell believes that not all software will be amenable to being moved from sequential to parallel computation.

He claimed virtualisation will bring together sets of inherently sequential software, with defined limits to its scalability onto a single platform that operates at high levels of utilisation.

“Having a more dense computing fabric can enable more applications to be brought onto a single device, i.e. one with more cores per die and on a smaller footprint,” said Mitchell.

“The savings from consolidation are greater when the density is higher – driving more savings through reducing power consumption, reducing IT management costs, improving infrastructure flexibility and increasing asset utilisation.”

To maximise the use of the power of the new six-core chips and the platforms that they are being built into, there will need to increased adoption of virtualisation.

The IT management framework needs to be robust enough to manage the increased complexity that can result, he said.