With the new PowerEdge 700 tower and PowerEdge 750 rack-mounted systems, Dell is trying to deflect more intense competition from rivals IBM Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, and Fujitsu-Siemens, who are trying to take the battle to Dell with inexpensive uniprocessor X86 servers that are a big portion of Dell’s sales volumes.
The Prescott support is interesting for Dell, as it is for all other suppliers of Intel 32-bit machines, in that it supports HyperThreading simultaneous multithreading and has a bigger L2 cache memory. HT, for those of you unfamiliar with this feature, presents two virtual cores to an operating system running on the Prescott chip using sophisticated circuitry even though there is only one physical core. Such multithreading can boost the performance of machines by 20% to 30%, but in the case of Prescott, Intel increased the number of stages in the chip to 31 compared to 20 in the prior Northwood Pentium 4 core, and Intel says that when you test common desktop workloads using Northwood and Prescott cores running at the same clock speed, you get about the same performance.
In effect, the HT benefits are cancelled out by the longer pipeline. However, this lengthening pipeline allows Intel to ramp up clock speed in the future, and it intends to boost the clock speed to 4GHz by the end of 2004. This chip should have 25% more performance than the Northwood. For server customers, the 1MB L2 cache on the Prescott chip is also appealing, being double that of the Northwood core. Many commercial applications like L2 cache, whereas plenty of desktop applications don’t need it as much. In any event, the PowerEdge 700 and 750 servers support this Prescott chip, which will also have 64-bit memory support later this year with as rev on the Prescott design.
The PowerEdge 700 tower server supports the 2.4GHz/128KB Celeron processor with a 400MHz front side bus, which is the default chip for this machine despite all the noise about the Prescott. Dell is supporting the 2.8GHz/1MB Prescott with an 800MHz front side bus as well as the 3.2GHz/512KB and 3.4GHz/512KB Northwood Pentium 4s with 800MHz buses in the PowerEdge 700 as well. It supports up to 4GB of DDR400 memory and the tower can house four Serial ATA or SCSI hard drives with RAID 0, 1 (mirroring), or 5 (data/parity striping) data protection through an optional RAID disk controller.
The machine has a single integrated Gigabit Ethernet controller and five PCI slots. The base machine with the Celeron processor, 256MB of main memory, a 40GB SATA drive, and no operating system has a list price of $699, but has a $100 instant rebate this week. This is not the price of a real business machine. With 1GB of main memory, four 18GB/15K RPM SCSI disk drives with a RAID controller, and a Windows 2003 license with five clients, this machine costs $3,292 after that instant rebate.
This article is based on material originally published by ComputerWire