HP LH4r Architecture/Technology Overview - Page 2

ZKLWHýSDSHU +3ý 1HW6HUYHUý /;Uýåèíí Scalability 4000 3000 2000 LXr 8500 LXr 8000 The Profusion SMP chipset architecture delivers the highest levels of performance and scalability for Intelbased systems. Compared to previous generations of SMP architectures and the performance of a single processor, the HP NetServer LXr 8500 provides improved scalability (see Figure 1) to 8 processors for Microsoft Windows NT™ Server 4.0, Microsoft Windows™ 2000, or Novell® NetWare. transactions per second 1000 LX Pro 0 July 97 Oct 97 Dec 98 Nov 98 June 99 One Two Four Four Eight Pentium Pentium Pentium Pentium II Pentium III Pro Pro Pro Xeon Xeon (KIWTG"30"6TCPUCEVKQP"RGTHQTOCPEG KORTQXGOGPV"HQT"*2"0GV5GTXGTU UKPEG"3;;9 The scalability of the HP NetServer LXr 8500 is impressive. Since the server is available in configurations from one to eight 550 MHz Pentium III Xeon processors with L2 cache sizes of 1 MB or 2 MB, it provides a wide range of compute capability. Using ServerBench measurements, scaling from two to four processors increases system throughput by 1.8 times, which is equivalent to 80% more transactions processed each second. When the system is scaled from four to eight processors, then the throughput improves by a factor of more than 1.5. Processor scaling is only one aspect of system scalability, however. The capability to add memory, mass storage and network I/O capacity is also important. Most applications that need a significant gain in overall transaction throughput will benefit by scaling all system hardware resources. In many cases, adding CPU power is less effective than adding memory or I/O bandwidth. On the HP NetServer LXr 8500, fully provisioning the PCI I/O accessory slots can add several times the workload of a minimal system. The HP NetServer LXr 8500 employs the Intel Profusion™ chipset, jointly developed by Intel and Corollary (now part of Intel), to provide a breakthrough 8-way Symmetric MultiProcessing (SMP) architecture. SMP architecture is one in which two or more linked processors are contained in a single enclosure and work cooperatively on sets of tasks. The processors are identical to each other and have shared access to all system resources. 2