Nehalem EX in Action

During the IDF 2009, Intel made a demo of a hardware based on Nehalem EX. The current Xeon Nehalem powering the new Mac Pro belongs to the EP series. The Nehalem EX will be available up to 8 core CPU, but one can install 4 or 8 units on the same motherboard. Hereafter is the task manager on Windows for a computer powered by four Octo Core Xeon Nehalem EX; in other words, 32 physical cores or 64 logic cores thank to hyperthreading. In order to feed such CPUs, there are interconnected with 4 QPI link, and each CPU is able to manage simultaneously 4 RAM modules (for a total of 16 in the current example)

One can now better understand the dilemma and the problem currently faced, and to be a growing concern in the forthcoming months, for application and OS developers: how to code and/or design their software/OS in order to fully benefit from such raw power? It will also be true for Larrabee, the graphical solution developed by Intel, initially based on 8 to 64 cores, and which will need to be managed and feed with data/request to be fully effective and to fully deliver.