X4-4 - Same price as the X3-4 but with more power
The big announcement about it is today at OpenWorld (it would be awesome if they mentioned it during the Intel keynote tonight), but the Exalytics X4-4 is actually available now. It's the same price as the X3-4 ($175,000 at list not including software, maintenance, tax, title, license, yada yada). This does mean the X3 is - effective immediately - no longer available, but then again, since the new one is the same price, I'm not sure why anyone would want the older one. No word yet on if you can upgrade an X3 to an X4, but since they did offer an upgrade kit from X2 to X3 (though I never heard of anyone buying it), I'm guessing there will be one for those wanting to make an X3 into an X4.X4-4 Specs
The main improvement over the X3 is the number of cores: it's still 4 Intel chips, but those chips all now have 15 cores on them, meaning the X4 has 60 cores compared to the X3's 40 cores. Here are the important details:- 4 Intel Xeon E7-8895v2 processors running at 2.8 - 3.6 GHz
- 8 - 60 cores (capacity on demand, more on this in a second)
- 2 TB of RAM
- 2.4 TB of PCI flash
- 7.2 TB of hard disk running at 10K RPMs (not that fast these days)
- 2 Infiniband ports running at 40 Gb/s
- 4 Ethernet ports running at up to 10 Gb/s
Cool Thing 1: Variable Speed & Cores
You probably heard about this last July. Oracle worked with Intel to design a line of their Xeon E7-889x chips specifically for Oracle. What we didn't realize until we saw it show up on the X4 spec sheet was that the chips were going in the Exalytics X4. Simply put, on the fly, Exalytics can vary how many cores it uses and when it's fewer cores, the speed goes up. If it's running 15 cores per chip, Intel sets the speed to 2.8 GHz. If it's only using 2 cores per chip the speed goes all the way to 3.6 GHz (a GHz is one billion clock ticks per second).
