Monday, March 21, 2005

Intel Readies Xeon MP Upgrade

"Intel is two weeks away from launching an upgrade to the high end of its Xeon MP processor line designed to boost performance in systems with four or more processors, according to sources familiar with the chip maker's plans. The company plans to launch its next-generation Xeon MP processor, code-named Trueland, at a press event scheduled for March 29 in San Francisco, the sources say."

They got the Trueland name wrong. It's Potomac. The updated Xeon MP processor will contain 8MB L3 cache, up from the 4MB offered now, and run at a clock speed of 3.33GHz. Therefore, the current Xeon MP frontside bus speed of 400MHz will likely go up, probably to 667MHz.

Potomac will ship alongside 'Cranford', a cheaper version of the product, equipped with 1MB of L2 cache and designed to fill the gap between two-way Xeon DP-based systems and four-way Xeon MP servers.

New 8- to 32-way servers can be expected based on the Potomac microprocessors.

These are essentially the last chip models prior to the dual-core products that will be introduced late this year.
Peter S. Kastner

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