[Info-vax] Itanium Poulson a game changer

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2013-02-23 12:29:45 +0000, Paul Sture said:

> In article <34c98eee-495d-4aa2-82ad-a0b25657c03a at googlegroups.com>,
>  Neil Rieck <n.rieck at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> 
>>> ... expunged ...
>>> This article says Poulson is an 8-core ship while I seem to recall previous
>> publications saying 4-8 cores (never knew what that meant other than the chip
>> might be available in two versions but that was just speculation on my part).
>> Does anyone know the correct answer?

Intel Itanium 9500 series is an eight core processor, with some 
out-of-order capabilities.

Here's an older Itanium 9500 series Poulson write-up 
<http://www.realworldtech.com/poulson/> on capabilities and such, and 
here's some Intel slideware 
<http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-papers/itanium-poulson-isscc-paper.pdf>. 
 Both of those documents are from a while back, but show it as an 
eight-core with some out-of-order capabilities

HP is already shipping Poulson servers as the Integrity i4-class boxes, 
so the processor core counts are easy to check.

Here's the i4-class Integrity rx2800 
<http://h20341.www2.hp.com/integrity/us/en/entry-class/rx2800-i4-overview.html>, 
with the highlight "Scale-Up to 16 cores, 384GB of system memory, 7.2TB 
of internal storage and six PCIe Gen2 I/O slots", and that's a 
two-socket box, the math is...

Here's the i4-class Integrity BladeSystem 
<http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/blades/components/c-class-integrity-bladeservers.html> 


For the denizens around here, what's missing from the Poulson Itanium 
9500-series Integrity servers is (presently) VMS support, and I'd 
suspect that will be at least discussed next month at the boot camp, if 
not announced there.

While digging up some details on this, there's an interesting detail in 
footnote 2 in the lifecycle graph here 
<http://h30507.www3.hp.com/t5/Mission-Critical-Computing-Blog/Let-the-facts-speak-Itanium-based-Integrity-server-support-goes/ba-p/91339> 
that I'd missed in my previous reading.  That footnote specifically 
omits OpenVMS support on Kittson; on the Poulson follow-on Itanium 
processor.  That status and support might change of course — the whole 
slide is subject to change, after all — but that was an interesting 
omission.

> Neil, I believe you just replied to a spammer who has latched onto the 
> fact that Itanium is a subject discussed here.
> That address was already in my killfile.

FWIW...  Could be.  I don't know.  In general, if y'all think it's 
spam, please remember to expunge the URL in the follow-ups and the 
replies, as getting the URL distributed is often the goal.  It's also 
often the case that the newsgroup replies — with the URL — will get 
past the netnews spam filters, where the original postings will often 
not.  Which means that newsgroup spammers can intentionally post 
something outrageous or notable to get folks to flame them, because 
that more reliably gets their postings past the filters...

There have been a variety of high-profile "watering-hole web site" 
security attacks lately, targeting Java users.  Facebook, Apple and 
Microsoft were all breached via Java zero-day attacks, and the same 
attacks apparently also involved Twitter and probably some other sites. 
 There've been security breaches at zendesk and cpanel as well, so 
there's a whole lot of nasty activity that has the potential to effect 
other web sites.



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