News

Intel Launches New Server Processors, Chipset

• By Scott Bekker
• 02/26/2002

The new processor is expected to provide the foundation for a new series of front-end infrastructure servers. Intel is positioning the performance of the Intel Xeon DPs as reason for enterprises to upgrade servers bought during the heavy infrastructural build ups of a few years ago.

"Using a platform that is just two years old, you're going to see almost twice the performance. We're saying, 'Hey, time to upgrade the front-end infrastructure,'" says Shannon Poulin, enterprise marketing manager at Intel.

The new Xeon DP, which began shipping to system builders in the fourth quarter, is built on the Netburst microarchitecture.

"It really is a new microarchitecture that we think will scale to 10 GHz and beyond," Poulin says.

The processors are also the first to feature Intel's new Hyper-Threading technology, which allows a single physical processor to act as if it were two logical processors. The new chipsets is also the first to use DDR 200 memory, which provides a memory bandwidth improvement over SDRAM, Poulin says.

Several vendors rolled out systems built on the Xeon DP this week, and others are preparing systems for introduction soon.

Intel is offering the Xeon DP in frequencies of 2.2 GHz, 2 GHz and 1.8 GHz, all with 512 KB of L2 cache. In 1,000-unit quantities, the processor is priced at $615 for 2.2 GHz, $417 for 2 GHz and $251 for 1.8 GHz. The chipset ranges in price from $92 to $132 in 1,000-unit quantities.

Intel also intends to launch a multiprocessing version of the processor based on the new microarchitecture, the Xeon MP, in the first quarter of this year, Poulin says.