Intel's 'Dunnington' Featured in New NEC Servers

By P J Connolly

September 22, 2008 —  NEC announced the release of a server that uses Intel’s “Dunnington” processors. The server features a four-socket design that the company says makes it adaptable for a variety of roles to meet the growing demand for virtualization and consolidation.

The NEC Express5800/A1160 can be configured with up to four nodes and four Xeon X7460 CPUs, for a total of 96 processor cores. NEC’s own MX chipset provides a 2GB/sec hot-swap PCI subsystem, as well as dedicated snoop cache memory and a snoop filter for use in NUMA (non-uniform memory architecture) applications.

The new servers will be available in North America by year’s end, and pricing begins at US$29,849 for an Express5800/A1160 with four E7440 CPUs running at 2.4GHz with 16MB cache, 8GB of RAM and a three-year limited warranty.

The Express5800/A1160 is said by NEC to be the first product developed under a 2005 cooperative agreement with Unisys. It offers hardware error logging, and each system node can run up to 256GB of ECC memory, for 1TB across four nodes. The catch is that customers wanting to max out the system will have to wait for NEC to offer 8GB DIMMs (dual in-line memory module). The DIMMs are slated for release in the first quarter of 2009.

The Express5800/A1160 offers a number of partitioning options, such as electrically isolated partitions. Key components, including I/O, memory and storage, can be physically accessed from front and rear, permitting in-rack servicing and hot swaps.


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