Today we started with the HP Integrity Blades breakout session. The BL890c i2 blade is the first 8 socket UNIX blade server in the industry.
The new BL8x0c i2 blade family uses the Boxboro chipset from Intel. It is a common chipset that HP uses for both Xeon and Itanium servers. For the Itanium processor, Intel has included memory double chip spare as part of the on processor memory controller, instead of on a separate memory controller as done in the past. The memory controller now offers 8 memory busses at 800 Mhz per core, or 32 memory busses per socket. In addition, HP still provides 3 DIMM slots per processor core, or 24 memory slots on a two socket blade.
HP spent some time discussing the new Blade Link that connects blades to each other. The BladeLink uses QPI to link up to 4 blades. It uses 5 links per socket, so no processor is more than 1 hop away, even when you have 8 sockets. The memory bandwidth is about one order of magnitude greater than on previous generation servers.
HP also highlighted the I/O capabilities of the BL8x0c i2 family. Each blade has 4 x Flex-10 links. Each Flex-10 link can be separated into 4 FlexNics.
All in all, the new HP Integrity BL8x0c i2 servers offer a lot of CPU, memory, and I/O bandwidth, in a very flexible environment. As I've mentioned before, not only are these very capable servers, but their flexibility allows people to select a server that fits their needs today, and know that they can easily grow the system as needed in the future.