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Are you having trouble consolidating servers?

Having troubles achieving the consolidation ratios you wanted?

Maybe Intel has got the solution! Yesterday, Intel has presented a 48 core CPU!!

Let’s do the math, 4 virtual machines per core, 48 cores that’s 192 virtual machines per CPU. Take a dual socket server, add two of these CPUs and you have 384 virtual machines per host. That was the good news, the bad news is that this 48 core CPU is only available to research institutes.

The CPU which is developed and produced in Europe has 48 cores which are grouped in pairs of 24 all with their own L2 cache. The 45nm CPU contains 1.3 billion transistors on area of 567 square millimeter. Communications between the core pairs is handled by a message buffer and router and a 256GB/s mesh network. Six pairs share one memory controller and can maximally address 32GB of memory. Energy consumption is between 25 and 125W.

As mentioned before this 48 core CPU is only available to research institutes but some of the techniques used will eventually be used in CPU we use for our virtualization magic. Let’s wait and see.

After the earlier news that Cisco was enlarging its stake in VMware now the news gets out that Intel sold half of its shares.

Intel disclosed that it had recently sold 1 million shares in the virtualization software maker and plans to sell another 3.75 million VMware shares on the open market. 500.000 of these shares were bought by Cisco. Another 500.000 were bought by EMC, VMware’s mother company.

After the rumors of Intel buying VMware from EMC one has to wonder what the future has in store for VMware. Also Cisco’s membership of Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program and the expansion of shares gives enough to speculate about.