HP DL360 The Intel processor roadmap for industry-standard servers technology - Page 15
Intel Virtualization® Technology, Intel® Microarchitecture Nehalem, Integrated memory controller - proliant no video
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Intel Virtualization® Technology Virtualization techniques that are completely enabled in software perform many complex translations between the guest operating systems and the hardware. With software virtualization, the processor overhead increases (performance decreases) as each guest OS and application vies for the host machine's physical resources such as memory space and I/O devices. Also, memory latency increases as the virtual machine monitor, or hypervisor, dynamically translates the memory addresses sent to and received from the memory controller. The hypervisor does this so that each guest operating system does not realize that it is being virtualized. Four-core Intel Xeon 5300 and 7300 series processors support Intel Virtualization Technology (VT-x), which is a hardware enhancement designed to reduce this software overhead. Intel VT-x is a group of extensions to the x86 instruction set that affect the processor, memory, and local I/O address translations. The new instructions enable guest operating systems to run in the standard Ring-0 architectural layer4. The Xeon 7300 series processors also include APIC Task Programmable Register, a new Intel® VT extension that improves interrupt handling to further optimize virtualization software efficiency. Intel® Microarchitecture Nehalem The Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series, introduced in 2008, is based on the Intel® Microarchitecture, codenamed Nehalem (Figure 10). The Intel Microarchitecture Nehalem is built on hafnium-based 45 nanometer Hi-k metal gate silicon technology, a new material combination that reduces electrical leakage and enables smaller, more energy-efficient, higher performance processors. The Intel Microarchitecture Nehalem includes several performance and power management innovations: • Dynamically managed cores, threads, cache, interfaces, and power • Extensions to the Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 4 (SSE4) for faster computation/manipulation of media (graphics, video encoding and processing, 3-D imaging, and gaming) • Seven Application Targeted Accelerators that improve the performance of specific applications • Extended Page Table that improves performance of software in virtualized environments • An integrated memory controller • Intel® QuickPath® Technology • a three-level cache hierarchy • Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology • Intel® Turbo Boost technology • Dynamic Power Management Integrated memory controller One of the most notable improvements in Intel Xeon 5500 series processor is the integrated memory controller (Figure 11). The memory controller uses three channels to access dedicated DDR-3 memory sockets. This delivers significant performance improvement over previous architectures that provide a single pool of system memory (Blackford has 4 FBD channels). The memory channels can operate at up to 1333 MT/s, but the actual speed depends on the number and type of DIMMs-registered or unbuffered-that populate the slots. For example, in a fully-populated system using registered DDR31333 DIMMs, the memory bus speed drops to 800 MT/s to maintain signal integrity. The three memory channels have a maximum total bandwidth of 32 GB/s. If a processor needs to access the memory of another processor, it can do so through the QuickPath Interconnect (QPI). 4 For more information, refer to the technology brief "Server virtualization technologies for x86-based HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant servers" at http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01067846/c01067846.pdf 15