Guys, I cannot believe this HP/AMD love in. Are you not aware of the enterprise boxes out there? The IBM x3950M2? it scales to 16 sockets on the Intel Quad core Tigerton. that chipset is what IBM & Intel have reworked & they call it the X4.
Basically it creams this AMD unit and has done for the last 3-4 years. It is now in its 3rd generation and is a killer for large database apps and large Virtualisation farms. This looks like desperation from HP to capture some top end x86 workloads, I thought 'Itanic' was the saviour here.

Wasn't it that HP had this thing built way back for when the Phenom was first to be released, but have held back until the errata was fixed.

What chipset is this thing using, nVidia?
it sounds as though it uses a dual socket design (the biggest phenom chipset so far) multiple times on one PCB. Why else would a board have 11 PCI-e slots?

I think AMD should be doing their own high-end chipsets and not leaving it to their competitors.
Look how VIA managed to grow just by doing chipsets.
AMD may also find that they can tweak the CPU's further.

Iwill and Tyan both made 8-socket Opterons, the later (S4881/B4881) is still available and has a nVidia chipset 

[most of the multi-socket AMD solutions at Tyan use nVidia chipsets]
So it would seem that for AMD to succeed in the multi-socket platform they need nVidia's help.

Until the reviews are in on this box, I don't think we should pigeon hole it with other phenom reviews, it may just be a great rendering station, or do things we have no tests for. I don't think everything is just about speed, it's about multi-tasking


I was waiting for some flame about how many jiggahertz the next Intel Spore3OMFG was going to run at and how it is soon to take over the world. Maybe it's just American Intel fanboys that think Intel dominates every sector of the market and AMD will bankrupt in 6 short months. But Intel doesn't, I make the purchase decision for the hardware in my company, and I just built 4 Opteron based boxes because of their price and performance, AMD has a cheaper overall platform than intel, plus a much better upgrade path. It's good to see them delivering a product that serves a market where Intel's brute force approach isn't effective.

Which that three way pci-e 16x and 8 processors, it might run vista ultimate and crysis at a decent speed... Now where's that spare generator gone... On a side note, I though HP where pioneering smaller blades, increased efficiency and clustering. Is this just a case of we built it because we could?

"....why they only recently decided to get the big box out. The answer I got was that the box is a performance and feature leader in its class, many commercial and virtualisation consolidation clients want it now..."

Can someone please explain to me how this is the answer for the question?

I don't like that analogy. If we are stuck with a monolith then you can kiss your arsenal get me some low cost manycore processing on my desktop now. Recall that to have innovation costs money, monopolies will only tweak until they are forced to innovate.

I view the whole GPU vs CPU as long lesson on that road. If Intel would not be faced by some upstarts that were trying to provide for a market that Intel did not think profitable contra the investment and R&D costs to get the GPU where it is at, we would still all be looking at monchrome green, 8 bit culture. Retro for sure would have been the elephants moto. Hopefully the smaller mice can realize that the elephant is indeed afraid of them and start innovating with intensity

A DL585 is 4U in height. Likewise A DL385 is 2U. The DL785 is however 7U.

(I've worked with hundreds of these boxes. Looking up manufacturer pages on HP's site is left an exercise for the reader.)

AMD must focus on gaining ground in places where Intel isn't. 

AMD made a critical mistake when it thought that it could fight Intel head on in the mainstream marketplace. They don't have the resources for that and almost got crushed because of that boneheaded error. A mouse, however confident, should not challenge an elephant. Even a weakened one. Ever.

AMD must refashion themselves as a creator of specialty CPU products like this one.

wow !! after exiting the 8-way market and trash talking Sun & IBM that there is no market for 8-way x86, now HP is compelled to re-introduce 8-way, a full 2 1/2 years after Sun. So what advantages does this have over sun x4600, other than the extra IO slots and extra local disks ? the Sun 8-way has the exact same memory capacity @64 dimm slots for 3U less rack space.

you cant talk to a sales rep on the phone when buying a server that cost more than most nice cars ?
i think some one is telling tall tells of big iron ownership

I had one of the 8-way Sun machines mentioned in the story for a couple months' demo. It was very very sweet. We found for rather parallel simulation algorithm code written in C that judicious use of CPU affinity calls and management of memory access patterns got us quite close to linear 1:1 scaling up to 16 threads.

I'd like to try one of these monsters, but HP doesn't let me configure and buy online ;-O