IBM launches "killer commodity system"

IBM has begun shipping its 16-processor x440 server, its highest-end mainstream machine using Intel chips.

The system consists of two 7-inch-tall, eight-processor, rack-mounted systems connected with high-speed cables. It's the current flag-bearer for IBM's sustained effort to build ever more powerful Intel servers.

An x440 with 16 processors and 8GB of memory costs $81,000, said Deep Advani, vice president of IBM's xSeries servers.

The price impressed Illuminata analyst Jonathan Eunice, who said that up until recently that much money would get a customer only an eight-processor server.

"I think it's the killer commodity system," he said. The x440 has a "dramatically lower price than any of the RISC alternatives" more customised machines from companies such as Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and IBM itself.

Sun's eight-processor V880 costs $100,000 for a system with 16GB of memory. That system, however, uses 64-bit processors that more gracefully handle large amounts of memory.

Intel's Itanium processor deals better with memory constraints. IBM plans to release an Itanium version of the x440 with four processors in early 2003, executives have said. Later in the year will come a 16-processor Itanium version and a 32-processor Xeon version.

The 16-processor x440's usefulness is limited by the comparative scarcity of software that runs well on high-end Intel servers, Eunice said. Although Microsoft's Windows operating system is getting better at taking full advantage of all the chips, higher-level software such as Exchange still needs work, he said.

Linux support will arrive later on the 16-processor x440, Advani said. "Linux right now scales pretty well to eight-way servers, and as it starts to scale beyond that we'll focus on that as well," he said.

The 16-processor x440 uses the first version Intel's Xeon MP processor, code-named Foster MP. Beginning early in the first quarter of 2003, IBM will support the newer Gallatin model, which has more high-speed cache memory and therefore better performance, Advani said.

Stephen Shankland writes for News.com