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Survivor's Guide to 2007: Storage & Servers: Page 5 of 9

Intel's Xeon quads will support only dual-socket systems at first and will require a completely new chipset, but support for both single and MP server-capable processors are on the road map for late 2007.

AMD is expected to lag behind, counting on the Opteron's technical superiority to win out. Unlike Intel's design, all four cores of the upcoming Opteron quad will reside on the same piece of silicon. Rather than depending on the complex caching schemes, front-side bus connections and system-board memory controller of the Xeon 5300, the four processor cores and memory controller of the Opteron will be on-die and linked with a high-speed system crossbar. Each core will continue to have independent L1 and L2 caches, and AMD will add an on-chip L3 cache--shared by all four cores--to increase multithread performance.

The Ethernet Juggernaut Rolls On

Fibre Channel has long been the fabric of choice for discriminating networked storage buyers, in part because IP-based storage in the form of iSCSI and NAS systems has been limited by the bandwidth offered by GbE links. But now, the growing availability, performance advantages and steadily decreasing per-port cost of 10 GbE should give IP-based storage vendors the upper hand over FC in storage network performance for perhaps the very first time.

One of the obstacles to the adoption of 10 GbE this year had been the lack of a twisted-pair option, but this challenge was overcome in July with the approval of the IEEE 802.3an standard for 10Gbase-T. Even though there was a short-throw copper standard for 10 GbE using the CX-4 cable scheme shared by InfiniBand and SAS, cost-effective 10 GbE required a new standard that could take advantage of inexpensive Category 6 cabling. Under 802.3an, legacy Cat 6 can be used for distances up to 55 meters, and Cat 6a and Cat 7 cabling will soon be approved to support even longer cable runs.