Where's the Nehalem cpu for servers?

[magreen]

Why'd they release Nehalem first as core i7 for desktop, when almost all of its improvements are in the server arena? Sure, there's a smattering of improvements in dekstop apps, most notably multitasking, video encoding and 3d rendering. But as Anand said many times in his review yesterday, it was designed as a server chip to finally take back that market share from Opteron.

So why'd they release it to desktop first? And when is the server variant supposed to be out?

 

[VirtualLarry]

Someone suggested that they are still doing system-level verification testing before fully rolling out the server platforms.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: magreen
So why'd they release it to desktop first? And when is the server variant supposed to be out?

Validation.

For now Intel gets to grease the skids and cut their teeth (manufacturing wise, both fab as well as ex-fab) while selling the teething product for good margins allowing them to continue to ramp up their validation efforts in parallel for server level robustness requirements.

Kinda like how many business waited for at least SP1 to release for Vista before migrating to it but in the meantime they were more than willing to ship products to end-users with Vista loaded pre-SP1. (Dell, HP, Lenovo, basically everyone...)

Server variant (gainestown) is supposed to be out in Q1'09...not for another 3 months or so.

 

[magreen]

What a great and complete answer. Thanks idc!