I thought AMD's Magny-Cours was supposed to do 12 cores w/ 2 6 core dies in the same package.

Either way, all this news just makes me sad that I'll probably never need anything more than a dual core in my personal machines...

The only benefit Itanium had left over Xeon was its Pelliston cache self-healing and its Machine Check Architecture. If Nehalem-EX has both, it is game over, Itanium. Solaris has the RAS infrastructure to take advantage of MCA, and that would provide the alternative for an HP-UX environment.

Is that the same kind of "machine check architecture" as AMD were talking about back in 2001 with "Hammer" (and delivering soon after)?

http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/DownloadableAssets/MPF_Hammer_Presentation.PDF

What took Intel's AMD64 clone so long to catch up?

What, now, are the value added Itanium features (RAS or otherwise) which will make it worth Intel's while to continue investing in Itanium?

--"Last December, Fujitsu tested a PrimeQuest Itanium box with 32 of Intel's dual-core "Montvale" Itanium 9150M processors spinning at 1.66 GHz, and it delivered 2.38 million transactions per minute (TPM) of throughput on the TPC-C online transaction processing test. IBM's eight-socket, 48-core Dunnington box, a System x3950 M2, was able to hit 1.2 million TPM."--

So in other words you're comparing a 64 core (32 socket) PrimeQuest Itanium box, the size of an entire rack that deliveres 2.38 million TPM to a 48 core (8 socket) Dunnington box in a 4U package that delivers 1.2 million TPM. I strongly suspect that I/O bandwidth between these two very different systems had a bigger part to play than the CPU performance. In any case I wonder how many 8 socket IBM System x3950's you can buy for the price of the PrimeQuest box.

What I want to see next year is a matching core for core TPM comparison between a Nehalem EX system and a Tukwilla Itanium system, together with the price for both. They must have the same amount of memory, I/O cards and disks.

Surely what matters when comparing systems is the performance for given required load, and the total cost i.e. hardware cost, software and support costs, energy consumption etc. Details like core count, amount of memory, disk etc. - who cares*? If system A performs twice as well as system B, it doesn't matter if it has 2x as much disk or half as much. Unless of course disk space is part of your performance criteria.

* ok I care, but I'm just interested, I'm not in purchasing :)

Intel does not have enough QPI's on the chip to scale past 4 sockets so they are doing a hoaky interconnect thru another chip. Getting rid of the front side bus finally is good news but Intel still has no clue how to create systems past four sockets without another vedors chipset. Looking for a windjammer to solve? Anyone know if windjammer will support Nehalem or is it just for Itanium?

--"Details like core count, amount of memory, disk etc. - who cares*? If system A performs twice as well as system B, it doesn't matter if it has 2x as much disk or half as much. Unless of course disk space is part of your performance criteria."--

Those details do matter. It's not about disk space it's about IOPs ( I/O operations per second). A single 10K rpm SCSI disk can do (on average) 125 IOPs and Database performance is very sensitive to that. Performance scales considerably the more IOPs you can throw at it. Take a look at the specs of some of the configurations the vendors put together to achieve high TPM benchmark results. Many of them have thousands of disks. In real life of cause very few people (if any) need to build single systems as big as that, and where there is a need other solutions are available that are better suited to provide a good balance between cpu performance, disk performance and scalability.