With Intel in Prague

Intel is hosting a shindig in Prague today, to celebrate the recent launch of its Dunnington processor, a.k.a. the Xeon 7400. Boyd Davis (Intel's General Manager, Server Product Group Marketing) duly trumpteted the 6-core chip ("a wonderful, wonderful piece of technology") and a series of impressive benchmarks, notably IBM's record-breaking 1.2 million-plus transactions per minute on its 8-socket System x3950 M2 server. Boyd went into overdrive on this: "it's like scoring a goal at football, ripping off your jersey and running around".



Intel's Boyd Davis shows off a wafer of 6-core Xeon 7400 (Dunnington) processors


Intel had some industry partners on hand to cast their benediction on the Xeon 7400 in general, and on virtualisation — for which the 6-core Dunnington CPU is a suitable platform — in particular. Microsoft's Bob Visse (Senior Director of Marketing, Server Marketing Group — yes, a man with 'marketing' twice in his job title) talked about Redmond's vision for the 'dynamic datacenter in the cloud', and announced in passing that its Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V hypervisor now supports up to 24 logical processors (that is, a 4-socket Xeon 7400 server). Next up was VMware's Douglas Philips (Senior Product Marketing Manager, Management & Automation, EMEA), who made pointed reference to the fact that VMware has been delivering some key virtualisation services, such as the live migration of running virtual machines, for several years.

All moderately informative and sporadically entertaining, but what the hacks were asking was: where's the hard news? Well, we did get some news, on the third generation of Intel's vPro remote management technology. But that's embargoed until next Monday (22 September), so you'll have to wait for those details.

So right now, there seems little for it but to explore what Prague has to offer of an evening.



Prague, of an evening...