System Architecture
Energy Efficiency
Expansion
Mac OS X Server
The new Xserve works faster, harder and more efficiently than ever before. And it all starts with the 64-bit Quad-Core Intel Xeon “Harpertown” 5400 series processor. Thanks to this powerful 45-nanometre Intel Core microarchitecture processor, Xserve now runs at blazing speeds up to 3.0GHz. Each Intel Xeon processor has its own 1600MHz system bus for up to 25.6GB/s of bandwidth, so there’s even faster access to main memory.
Four processing cores deliver an incredible performance boost across the board. A massive 12MB of L2 cache per processor keeps instructions and data close to the processor cores, reducing frontside bus transactions and memory latency. Intel’s cache technology allows core pairs to share 6MB of cache. If one core happens to be idle or needs less cache resources, the other can fully utilise it. The enhanced SSE4 SIMD engine handles 128-bit vector computations in a single cycle.
High-bandwidth memory.
Xserve supports up to 32GB of 800MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM (fully buffered DIMM) memory, providing a 64 percent throughput boost over the previous-generation Xserve1. And over most of the competition.
PCI Express 2.0 expansion.
In every Xserve, there are two PCI Express 2.0 expansion slots — one 8-lane and one 16-lane — with up to 8GB/s of bandwidth for intensive I/O devices. That’s up to four times the bandwidth of any previous Xserve. One slot can be configured as a PCI-X slot for compatibility with existing devices.
- Testing conducted by Apple in December 2007 using pre-production 3.0GHz 8-core Xserve units and shipping 3.0GHz quad-core Xserve units. All systems were configured with 8GB of RAM. Results are based on the STREAM v. 5.6 benchmark (www.cs.virginia.edu/stream/ref.html) using OMP support for multiprocessor-compiled builds. Performance tests are conducted using specific computer systems and reflect the approximate performance of Xserve.
