This chipset is built on IBM’s advanced copper 0.13-micron technology, which creates faster, lower power-consuming and heat-producing chips. So servers built with the chipsets will run faster, have lower power costs, and require less cooling, which increases reliability and reduces TCO.
The XA-32 has the following features:
Support for up to 16-way SMP with Xeon MP processors and up to four-way SMP with Xeon DP processors.
Support for scalability ports that lets you expand the x440 server from two-way, to four-way, to eight-way and by connecting two x440s together, to 16-way.
32-64 MB of a Level 4 cache (levels 1-3 are internal to the Xeon MP processors), using IBM XceL4 Server Accelerator Cache, to maximize performance, especially for eight-way and 16-way configurations.
Two Remote I/O buses per node to connect an RXE-100 external PCI-X enclosure.
Memory mirroring and up to 6.4 GBps memory bandwidth.
Up to 16 GB of main memory per SMP Expansion Module using 1 GB DIMMs (and 32 GB of RAM with 2 GB DIMMs once they are available).
Six PCI-X buses, two for integrated devices, four to internal PCI-X slots.
2.2.2Intel Xeon MP and DP processors
Many of the x440 models use the Xeon Processor MP, Intel’s latest microprocessor for high-end server. It has the following key features:
400 MHz front-side bus providing an effective burst throughput of 3.2GBps, compared to 800 MBps available to a 100 MHz bus. This provides high performance, especially with TCP/IP.
Hyper-Threading creates two logical processors that share resources in one physical processor. A processor with Hyper-Threading can execute multiple threads, delivering a performance improvement in servers running software that has been optimized to use Hyper-Threading:
–On a four-way x440, the benefit can be as much as 20%
–On an eight-way, the benefit can be as much as 10%
Figure 2-3 on page 45 shows that two physical processors will outperform one processor with Hyper-Threading enabled.
Customers should expect improved results as applications are Hyper-Threading aware. Best-case applications today are databases, Java applications, Web servers, and e-mail.
