[Beowulf] Xeon D systems? (and 10G in general)

[Fabricio Cannini]

On 11-03-2015 06:52, John Hearns wrote:
> Very good article on The Platform:
>
> http://www.theplatform.net/2015/03/09/intel-crafts-broadwell-xeon-d-for-hyperscale/
>
> On 10 March 2015 at 19:42, Mark Hahn <hahn at mcmaster.ca
> <mailto:hahn at mcmaster.ca>> wrote:
>
>     Intel recently introduced an interesting product:
>     Xeon D is a Broadwell (Haswell shrink) SoC.
>
>     It only has 8 cores, not high-clocked and only 2 dimm channels, so
>     it's definitely not at the same level of fat-node goodness as an
>     e5-26xx v3.  But for 45W, you also get 2x onboard 10Gb!
>
>     Anyone working on an HPC system based on these quite compact
>     building blocks?  the SoC also has stuff like PCIe and SATA,
>     which is why a lot of the coverage is calling it a chip for desktop
>     NAS, etc.  But for HPC purposes, the CPU is quite decent, memory
>     balance is reasonable, and it's hard
>     to argue with two free 10G...
>
>     On that topic, I've read some work recently on performance tuning of
>     Intel 10G, but not in an HPC context.  Is 10G still
>     sucking for MPI latency?  (SFP+ DA noticably better than 10GbT?)
>
>     If you're thinking of saying "why bother with an x86_64 SoC
>     when you can get a 64b Atom SoC", well, can you?  (for cheap,
>     at commodity volume, etc...)  Do any of the surviving Atom SoCs
>     still have onboard multiport switching fabrics?

I'm not sure of what to make of this new Xeon, especially because it 
cuts right through the E3-1200 series, as you can see in the link that 
John provided, but may I speculate a little with two possibilities:

- Intel is phasing out the E3-1200 series
( Unlikely, IMHO )

- Intel is beefing up its [def|off]ensive options against ARMv8, 
especially after Cray and Lenovo announced tests with Cavium's Thunder-X 
chip
	http://www.eweek.com/servers/cray-to-evaluate-arm-chips-in-its-supercomputers.html
	http://www.theplatform.net/2015/02/27/prototype-arm-clusters-muscle-hpc/



Any other bet ?