Hewlett-Packard has said it is discontinuing with its eight-processor servers as it believes that the impending Xeon chips called “cores,” which employs dual-processing engines, will be more popular to eight-processor machines in the near future.
"We are not refreshing our eight-socket platforms," said Colin Lacey, director of platform marketing for HP’s industry standard server group. "We have determined, based on the performance we anticipate delivering in the x86 space in 2005, that the position of the eight-way will be somewhat marginalized by these next-generation four-way platforms," he said.
Experts also are of the view that HP has taken a step in the right direction. "Eight-way systems are a lot more complicated than single-way," said Sageza Group analyst Clay Ryder. “Beyond four-processor servers, things become geometrically more complicated. When things become complicated, they become expensive," he said.
Meanwhile, the company on Tuesday announced two new four-Xeon servers and a new dual-processor system. The latest Xeon processors from Intel bring 64-bit memory extensions to four-processor servers that are code-named “Cranford” and “Potomac” for low and high-end model respectively.
This new chips will be fitted in HP’s latest ProLiant DL580 G3 and ML570 G3 servers.
The seven inches rack mounted DL580 G3 employs a state-of-the-art technology called hot-plug RAID memory whereby a faulty memory module can be changed in a running server without upsetting operations. It accommodates 32GB of memory and costs $6,849.
However, ML570 G3 is larger than DL580 and comes either in standalone model or rack-mount machine measuring 10.5 inches. Unlike DL580, which has only seven input-output slots, ML570 has 10 sockets and can easily accommodate 48GB of memory. It is priced at $5,249.
While the company’s new dual-processor ML350 G4p comes at a staring price of $1,539, which includes Xeon MP Processor code-named “Irwindale” and has a 2MB of cache memory. Though it lacks hot-plug RAID memory, instead it employs an online spare memory – an alternative to the technology.
HP is also developing four-Xeon blade servers.
