The Ingredients

Now that you’ve seen the ways multicore is reshaping computing today, and will continue to drive it forward into the future, let ‘s get down to actually building this eight-core beast.

Here are the system specs for the system. The approximate bill-of-material cost (at time of this writing) of this box is $4,500 (without display).

CPUs: Dual Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processor X5355 CPUs running at 2.66GHz

Motherboard: Intel® Workstation Board S5000XVN motherboard, with the Intel® Chipset 5000X

System RAM: 2GB (4x512MB) of FB-DIMM DDR2-667 RAM, giving 21GB/sec of read bandwidth, and 10.7GB/sec of write bandwidth

Graphics Card: nVidia* 8800 graphic card.

Storage: 1.3-terabyte RAID array, five disks (RAID 0) (7,200RPM Maxtor* DiamondMax* 6L30050 SATA drives)

Optical Drive: TDK* 420N DVD burner

Case: CoolerMaster* CMStacker* 830 case

Power Supply: Enermax* Galaxy DGA1000EWL

OS: Windows* XP Professional with SP2, DirectX 9.0c

One interesting thing to note about this rig is its memory configuration. The Intel® Workstation Board S5000XVN motherboard is dual-socket, and the Intel® Chipset 5000X implements dual frontside buses that effectively create a pair of dual-channel memory banks that are interleaved to produce a single logical pool of memory for the CPUS and OS to use. The result is that the system has 21GB/sec of read bandwidth, and 10.7GB/sec of write bandwidth.

The Intel® Chipset 5000X’s Datasheet explains further:

The MCH provides four channels of Fully Buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) memory. Each channel can support up to 4 Dual Ranked FB-DIMM DDR2 DIMMs....The MCH can support up to 16 DIMMs or a maximum memory size of 64GB physical memory... The read bandwidth for each FB-DIMM channel is 5.3GB/s for DDR2 667FB-DIMM memory which gives a total read bandwidth of 21 GB/s for four FB-DIMM channels. Thus, this provides 10.7 GB/s of write memory bandwidth for four FB-DIMM channels.

One downside to the Intel® Workstation Board S5000XVN motherboard is that it currently doesn’t support multiple graphics cards, so we equipped it with a single nVidia* 8800 graphic card. Though a single GPU, this card provides ample graphics performance, and for much of the compute-intensive workloads, a single top-end GPU is more than adequate to get the job done.