Start your servers: Intel’s next-gen CPU smokes!

Posted by David Yahalom under Hardware, Oracle

UPDATE: Whoops! Had bad URL in link to Nehalem Benchmarks. Fixed!

AnandTech, one of the best sources of hardware news & reviews,  have just published preliminary benchmarks of Intel’s next-gen CPU - the Nehalem.

Even when the CPU is not using final silicon and being coupled with a very early and unstable motherboard, it smoked the benchmarks suppressing a Penryn-based Core2 quad by as much as %50! In fact, a 2.6Ghz Nehalem is faster than a 3.2Ghz Penryn! Amazing.

This got me thinking about the x86 server market, especially when compared to non-x86 servers such as SPARC or PowerPC machines.
Even now we see that dollar-to-dollar, x86 servers can sometime outperform non-x86 hardware.

Nowadays when Oracle RAC clusters based on cheap $7000 x86 servers outperform single-instance super expensive high-end Sun/IBM servers, Intel’s new Nehalem could very well be the final proof many DBAs need in order to ditch their old SPARC/PowerPC servers and transition to Linux x86 RAC installations.

Anyway, AMD is going to launch a new chip design in early 2009 and I still see great promise in IBMs Cell CPU deign.

Interesting times ahead.

Read more about Nehalem’s architecture and on-die memory controller here.