Table of Contents
Advertisement
memory slots (from 16 to 32), and benefits from the increased number of
processor cores (from 8 to 16 cores) and increased front-side bus bandwidth
(from 667 MHz to 1066 MHz). It also derives benefits from a dedicated front side
bus for each multi-core processor, as compared to the x3850 and x366, which
used a shared front-side bus for each pair of processor sockets.
The Hurricane 4 chipset also adds improved bandwidth for its three scalability
ports and has increased memory throughput with eight high speed memory
buffer chips. Furthermore, the x3850 M2 supports more I/O slots from previously
having six PCI-X (Tulsa based x3850 has four PCIe and two PCI-X slots) to
seven PCIexpress slots.
The onboard LSI 1078 RAID controller and the optional ServeRAID MR10k
installed in a dedicated PCIe x8 slot have significantly improved storage
subsystem bandwidth compared to the x3850's Adaptec ServeRAID 8i RAID
controller which shared a slower common PCI-X 66 MHz bus to the Southbridge
with the onboard Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet controllers. The Hurricane 4 has a
dedicated Enterprise Southbridge Interface (ESI) for the dual port onboard PCIe
x4 Broadcom 5709C controllers, RSA II, Video, USB 2.0 and Serial interfaces.
The x3850 M2 also has an onboard 4x SAS port which can be used in
conjunction with the ServeRAID MR10k for additional disk drive expansion (for
example, using one or more EXP3000 storage enclosures) not previously
possible with the x3850, without the use of one PCIe slot for a MegaRAID 8480
SAS RAID controller.
Table 2-1 compares major differences between x3850 M2 and the x3850.
Table 2-1 Comparing the x3850 M2 to x3850 servers
Feature
Processors
Front-side bus
Memory controller
60
Planning, Installing, and Managing the IBM System x3950 M2
System x3850 server
Dual-core Intel Xeon 7100
series
Two 667 MHz (two
processors on each bus)
Hurricane 3.0
System x3850 M2 server
Dual-core Intel Xeon
E7210 and quad-core Intel
Xeon 7300 series
processors and quad-core
and 6-core Intel Xeon 7400
series processors
Four 1066 MHz (one
processor on each bus)
Hurricane 4.0
Advertisement
Table of Contents
