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You may wonder, what was in this for IBM? The answer is fairly straightforward. IBM used to make proprietary chipsets for Intel chips! The pride of the xServer

You may wonder, what was in this for IBM? The answer is fairly straightforward. IBM used to make proprietary chipsets for Intel chips! The pride of the xServer/xSeries systems were "complex" setups -- multiple chassis -- with up to 32 sockets, and 512 GB of RAM. These required a lot of IBM internal engineering, where they made pin-compatible sockets for what Intel was offering at the time, and glued those chips into _hugely_ different topologies than Intel had in mind. These systems sound small today, but back in 2001, this was a really big deal for x86. The IBM-proprietary chipsets were much more expensive than off-the-shelf systems, but still a fair bit cheaper than going with NCR or Unisys, competing vendors with proprietary x86 MP designs. IBM had a lot at stake when that socket changed. Achieving pin-compatibility is hard! Intel is very jealous of their documentation, and prefers to offer paper only, with water-marked copies. It's like owning a gutenberg bible. Engineering something pin-compatible with an Intel x86 CPU has never been easy. It was no doubt worth it to their "big" x86 server business to ask Intel to make a special run of chips with the old socket layout, but the new emt64 extensions. I bet it was a complete no-brainer compared to the costs of integrating a new socket!

walrus01 7y ago
In the era of dual socket, single core xeons, ServerWorks also produced non Intel chipsets, North and South bridge, for motherboard makers to use. There were tyan and supermicro boards that used them. Common at the time in 1ru and 2ru size servers. Also found on big quad socket supermicro boards. From 2002: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/73498-serverworks-ships-grand-champion-chipset https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/73498-serverworks-ships-... I actually think the ibm systems used the grandchampion chipset. https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/GC-HE/P4QH6.cfm https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/GC-HE/P... Serverworks was later acquired by broadcom.
- jumpingmice 7y ago
  IBM was locked in a brutal fight with HP and Dell to take share in the early x86 server market. Their chipsets were neat but they looked silly next to an HP Opteron box. Integrated memory control ended the chipset race. Still their chipsets had neat features worth remembering, such as the ability to use local main memory as a last-level cache of memory read from remote nodes. And of course they went to 64 sockets which was respectable.
  - walrus01 7y ago
    As I recall HP also used serverworks for a lot of dual socket 2ru systems, for people who didn't want to buy opteron (and from 2000 to 2003 before the release of opteron)
  - hapless 7y ago
    These are pretty bold words, my friend. Opteron had vastly better architecture than the Intel chipsets of the day, but it topped out at four or eight sockets, I forget. IBM, at the time, could offer you Opteron-like architecture and performance, with up to 32 sockets, using Intel chips. That was worthwhile to some customers. "Intel" wasn't the selling position. It was x86 or x86-64, with "big" as the selling position. I'm not here to apologize for Intel. I'm just saying, those IBM proprietary chipsets had their nice bits.
    - walrus01 7y ago
      But in the end, Xeon systems with anything more than 4 sockets, with 8, 16 or 32 CPUs were a rare weird niche market compared to on one hand, things like zseries mainframes and big Sun and SGI machines, and on the other hand, people who learned to write software to distribute workloads across a couple of dozen $2000 to $4000 1RU dual socket servers rather than buying one beastly proprietary thing with a costly support contract.
    - p_l 7y ago
      Early Opteron (with Socket 940) topped at 8 sockets glueless - with the same chipset one could drive a socket 754 chip. However, with custom glue logic, one could expand it very far - AMD offering in that space was "Horus" chipset which connected 4 sockets with external fabric (infiniband, iirc) to create 64 socket systems. Similar tactic was (and still is) offered by SGI in their UltraViolet systems which utilize the same principle using NUMAlink fabric and Xeon cpus.
undersuit 7y ago
I started following hardware news maybe a year or two before these IBM P4 were manufactured. I remember all the buzz on sites like Geek.com and TheInquirer.net about the soon to be released AMD Clawhammers, Intel constantly pushing Itanium, and the slow feature crawl of Intel Xeons marching over Big Iron regardless of what the Itanium team wanted.
- hapless 7y ago
  IBM flirted with Itanium. They spent a lot of money on software support for Itanium. They sold a few hardware Itanium systems to customers who really wanted one. There just wasn't enduring customer demand to make an ongoing hardware/software product out of it.
  - walrus01 7y ago
    I think theregister and theinquirer helped steer a lot of people away from itanium in that era, showing the $/performance that could be achieved with a larger number of much less costly dual socket Xeon and opteron boxes. People who really wanted to centralize everything on one godly giant machine went to things like zseries mainframe, not itanium. Everyone else started running Linux on x86...
    - hapless 7y ago
      I don't think the press had anything to do with it. Customers got engineering samples in their hands and they were very, very slow.
      - chrisseaton 7y ago
        Everyone was promised sufficiently-smart compilers would make great use of them, but that never works out as a plan.
        jacobush 7y ago
        They very much underestimated the complexity of such compilers. But the concept is fine. Itanium had a lot of raw power, but you had to do demoscene level trickery to get that performance.
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
This article makes me nostalgic for the days when every office building on the planet was carpet bombed with black and charcoal Dell Dimensions. I spent a lot of time pulling drives and reselling systems that were end of life. I mostly dealt with switches and networking gear I was still encountering old 32bit dual and quad socket X-series semi regularly when I moved on in 2015ish.

walrus01 7y ago

In the era of dual socket, single core xeons, ServerWorks also produced non Intel chipsets, North and South bridge, for motherboard makers to use. There were tyan and supermicro boards that used them. Common at the time in 1ru and 2ru size servers. Also found on big quad socket supermicro boards. From 2002: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/73498-serverworks-ships-grand-champion-chipset https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/73498-serverworks-ships-... I actually think the ibm systems used the grandchampion chipset. https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/GC-HE/P4QH6.cfm https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon/GC-HE/P... Serverworks was later acquired by broadcom.

jumpingmice 7y ago
IBM was locked in a brutal fight with HP and Dell to take share in the early x86 server market. Their chipsets were neat but they looked silly next to an HP Opteron box. Integrated memory control ended the chipset race. Still their chipsets had neat features worth remembering, such as the ability to use local main memory as a last-level cache of memory read from remote nodes. And of course they went to 64 sockets which was respectable.
- walrus01 7y ago
  As I recall HP also used serverworks for a lot of dual socket 2ru systems, for people who didn't want to buy opteron (and from 2000 to 2003 before the release of opteron)
- hapless 7y ago
  These are pretty bold words, my friend. Opteron had vastly better architecture than the Intel chipsets of the day, but it topped out at four or eight sockets, I forget. IBM, at the time, could offer you Opteron-like architecture and performance, with up to 32 sockets, using Intel chips. That was worthwhile to some customers. "Intel" wasn't the selling position. It was x86 or x86-64, with "big" as the selling position. I'm not here to apologize for Intel. I'm just saying, those IBM proprietary chipsets had their nice bits.
  - walrus01 7y ago
    But in the end, Xeon systems with anything more than 4 sockets, with 8, 16 or 32 CPUs were a rare weird niche market compared to on one hand, things like zseries mainframes and big Sun and SGI machines, and on the other hand, people who learned to write software to distribute workloads across a couple of dozen $2000 to $4000 1RU dual socket servers rather than buying one beastly proprietary thing with a costly support contract.
  - p_l 7y ago
    Early Opteron (with Socket 940) topped at 8 sockets glueless - with the same chipset one could drive a socket 754 chip. However, with custom glue logic, one could expand it very far - AMD offering in that space was "Horus" chipset which connected 4 sockets with external fabric (infiniband, iirc) to create 64 socket systems. Similar tactic was (and still is) offered by SGI in their UltraViolet systems which utilize the same principle using NUMAlink fabric and Xeon cpus.

undersuit 7y ago

I started following hardware news maybe a year or two before these IBM P4 were manufactured. I remember all the buzz on sites like Geek.com and TheInquirer.net about the soon to be released AMD Clawhammers, Intel constantly pushing Itanium, and the slow feature crawl of Intel Xeons marching over Big Iron regardless of what the Itanium team wanted.

hapless 7y ago
IBM flirted with Itanium. They spent a lot of money on software support for Itanium. They sold a few hardware Itanium systems to customers who really wanted one. There just wasn't enduring customer demand to make an ongoing hardware/software product out of it.
- walrus01 7y ago
  I think theregister and theinquirer helped steer a lot of people away from itanium in that era, showing the $/performance that could be achieved with a larger number of much less costly dual socket Xeon and opteron boxes. People who really wanted to centralize everything on one godly giant machine went to things like zseries mainframe, not itanium. Everyone else started running Linux on x86...
  - hapless 7y ago
    I don't think the press had anything to do with it. Customers got engineering samples in their hands and they were very, very slow.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      Everyone was promised sufficiently-smart compilers would make great use of them, but that never works out as a plan.
      - jacobush 7y ago
        They very much underestimated the complexity of such compilers. But the concept is fine. Itanium had a lot of raw power, but you had to do demoscene level trickery to get that performance.

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

This article makes me nostalgic for the days when every office building on the planet was carpet bombed with black and charcoal Dell Dimensions. I spent a lot of time pulling drives and reselling systems that were end of life. I mostly dealt with switches and networking gear I was still encountering old 32bit dual and quad socket X-series semi regularly when I moved on in 2015ish.