Istanbul Pricing (Street)
| AMD "Istanbul" Opteron™ Processor Family | |||
| 2400 Series | Price | 8400 Series | Price |
| 2.6GHz Six-Core, 6-Thread AMD Opteron 2435 (75W ACP) | $1060.77 | 2.6GHz Six-Core, 6-Thread AMD Opteron 8435 (75W ACP) | $2,842.14 |
| 2.4GHz Six-Core, 6-Thread AMD Opteron 2431 (75W ACP) | $743.74 $699.00 | 2.4GHz Six-Core, 6-Thread AMD Opteron 8431 (75W ACP) | $2,305.70 |
| 2.2GHx Six-Core, 6-Thread AMD Opteron 2427 (75W ACP) | $483.82 $499.99 | ||
Nehalem-EP/EX Pricing (Street)
After almost two months on the market, the Nehalem has been on the street long enough to see a 1-3% drop in prices. How does Istanbul stack-up against the Nehalem-EP/Xeon pricing?
| Intel "Nehalem" Xeon Processor Family | |||
| EP Series | Price | EX Series | Price |
| 2.66GHz Quad-Core, 8-Thread Intel Xeon EP X5550 (95W TDP) | $999.95 $999.99 | Quad-Core, 8-Thread Intel Xeon EX | TDB |
| 2.4GHz Quad-Core, 8-Thread Intel Xeon EP E5530 (80W TDP) | $548.66 $549.99 | Quad-Core, 8-Thread Intel Xeon EX | TBD |
| 2.26GHz Quad-Core, 8-Thread Intel Xeon EP E5520 (80W TDP) | $400.15 $379.99 | ||
| 2.26GHz Quad-Core, 8-Thread Intel Xeon EP L5520 (60W TDP) | $558.77 $559.99 | ||
Compared to the competing Nehalem SKU's, the Istanbul is fetching a premium price. This is likely due to the what AMD perceives to be the broader market that Istanbul is capable of serving (and its relative newness relative to demand, et al). Of course, there are no Xeon Nehalem-EX SKU's in supply to compare against Istanbul in the 4P and 8P segments, but in 2P, it appears Istanbul is running 6% higher at the top bin SKU and 27% higher at the lower bin SKU - with the exception of the 60W TDP part, upon which Intel demands a 13% premium over the 2.2GHz Istanbul part.
This last SKU is the "green datacenter" battleground part. Since the higher priced 2.6GHz Istanbul rates a 15W (ACP) premium over the L5520, it will be interesting to see if system integrators will compare it to the low-power Xeon in power-performance implementations. Comparing SPECpower_ssj2008 between similarly configured Xeon L5520 and X5570, the performance-per-watt is within 2% for relatively anemic, dual-channel 8GB memory configurations.
In a virtualization system, this memory configuration would jump from an unusable 8GB to at least 48GB, increasing average power consumption by another 45-55W and dropping the performance-per-watt ratio by about 25%. Looking at the relative performance-per-watt of the Nehalem-EP as compared to the Istanbul in TechReport's findings earlier this month, one could extrapolate that the virtualization performance-per-watt for Istanbul is very competitive - even with the lower-power Xeon - in large memory configurations. We'll have to wait for similar SPECpower_ssj2008 in 4P configurations to know for sure.
System Memory Pricing (Street)
System memory represents 15-20% of system pricing - more in very large memory foot prints. We've indicated that Istanbul's time-to-market strategy shows a clear advantage (CAPEX) in memory pricing alone - more than compensating for the slight premium in CPU pricing.
| System Memory Pricing | |||||
| DDR2 Series (1.8V) | Price | DDR3 Series (1.5V) | Price | ||
| $100.00 |
| $138.00 | ||
| $80.00 |
| $132.00 | ||
| $396.00 |
| $1035.00 | ||
These parts show a 28%, 40% and 62% premium price for DDR3 components versus DDR2 which indicates Istanbul's savings window is still wide-open. Since DDR3 prices are not expected to fall until Q3 at the earliest, this cost differential is expected to influence "private cloud" virtualization systems more strongly. However, with the 0.3V lower voltage requirement on the DDR3 modules, Nehalem-EP actually has a slight adavantage from a operational power perspective in dual-channel configurations. When using tripple-channel for the same memory footprint, Nehalem-EP's memory consumes about 58% more power (4x8GB vs. 9x4GB).
[...] AMD Istanbul and Intel Nehalem-EP: Street Prices … [...]
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