Intel’s Xeon 7500-Series CPUs Target Enterprise Computing

In the course of one week, two separate events signaled what may be the end of Intel's grand experiment with VLIW architecture. First, Intel released the Xeon 7500-series processor family, containing many features found in the Itanium, and then, Microsoft ended its support of Itanium.

The Xeon 7500 family, developed under the codename "Nehalem-EX," is a monster of a chip, with 2.3 billion transistors used in eight cores connected with high-speed interconnects, four very fast memory channels, and Hyper-Threading, allowing each core to run two threads at a time. It adds more than 20 features that have been in the Itanium for some time, giving the Xeon 7500-series levels of performance and reliability other Xeons can't match.

The Itanium has never been a big seller for Intel, but the few machines that were sold were absolutely valuable. Itanium was used in servers that defined "mission-critical." They had to run 24x7 and not be brought down by a crash. Itanium servers were usually multi-million dollar beasts that ran multi-petabyte Oracle databases or line-of-business applications that had to always run.

This meant something known as RAS: reliability, availability and serviceability. The Xeon 7500 has more than 20 new RAS features normally found in Itanium processors, marking the first time they have been used in a Xeon.

The most significant among them is Machine Check Architecture (MCA) Recovery, a feature that allows the CPU to work with the operating system to isolate errors that would otherwise crash the machine and keep the machine operating. Other features include memory corruption protection like SMI Lane Failover to handle memory errors and QPI self-healing for errors during interprocessor communication.