New Intel CPU !

[iLight]

The E55XX are there ! 30% better than the E54XX !

 

You can turn 8 cores per CPU ! So if you dual cpu, you'll have about 16 cores.

 

 

 

What about them for game servers? Good or Bad ?

[Todd Holley]

They just keep adding more and more..... I guess they officially stopped searching for higher processor speeds, and just substituted it with multiple cores.

[Mike]

We will be looking into these. However it will still be about 5-6 months before these are cost effective. I don't think they've even been launched yet.

 

Also, So far it hasn't been shown that scaling beyond 8 cores is even effective. From the people that I talked to who have tested 16 core machines, they said the benefit just wasn't there.

[iLight]

They are launched. A french company already rent them with 12go of ram and 2x 1000go.. For what ? 700$ month :x

[Todd Holley]

I believe 8-16 cores would be effective on "super machines" where you maybe have ~50-100 game servers on a machine with multiple network ports, endless amounts of ram, and large hard drives.... this could lower the pricing but render your services useless if you have problems with 1 machine. Rule of thumb.... a bunch of small machines is better than a couple large machines.

[Mike]

These were just released yesterday btw. (I'm takling about the actual Xeon Processors, the 55xx series, not the Desktop version i7s).

 

And was talking about the ability of the operating system to properly utilize 16 cores.

[Todd Holley]

Looking at a few sources on google..... some state that server 2k8 can handle as many as 256 logical cores. I don't know about 2k3.

[jcroom]

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/compare-specs.aspx

[Todd Holley]

Wow.... never even considered any of that. Hot swap cpu's and memory. That's nice. I think I am going to try 2008 out.

[jcroom]

It's pretty nice for web hosting (IIS7) have not tried to run game servers on it yet though....

[ECF]

Why would anyone want to run 100 game servers on a box? Think of this. What happens if a component of that server dies? eg. HDD, CPU etc....

 

You have 100 clients without a gameserver...

 

More is not always better...

[Todd Holley]

Exactly... I have always said (literally said in multiple threads). A bunch of small machines is better than a few large ones. But it does appear to be cheaper and easier to manage..... And I guess if you were running a hot swappable raid setup it could be fine. That of course doesn't account for other component failures.