IDF Spring '03 : Day 3 Keynote - Enterprise - News - HEXUS.net

Big Boys : SuperDome

The HP Superdome
Another change which occurred today was with HP showcasing "SuperDome" which normally has run the PA Risc environment but they have made the switch to the Itanium 2 platform. The solution is capable of running Windows, Linux, OpenVMS. Within the SuperDome platform there are several CPU cards, these have 4 * 4 CPUs within them, 512MB Ram each. The system is aimed to be flexible and upgradeable. HP has some CPU cards which can be mounted within the system which contain 2 Madison CPUs, and an HP Cache controller. The Madison will be coming out in the summer of 2003. HP is also going to have Itanium solutions from Server right down to desktop.

The modular CPU
Another implementation within the Enterprise sector is with PCI-Express, this is something which we covered yesterday, but we heard some more information today - this was that the introduction of PCI Express to a main board solution reduces the board size by 53%, one of the reasons for this is the serial technology as well as the drop of need of a host bridge which PCI, and PCI-X require. We saw a demonstration of PCI-Express networking we were shown transfer rates of 187Mb/s which is single way - it is capable of this speed both ways between the MCH and the PCI-Express controller.