Intel offered more details yesterday about its Itanium
processor family as well as its forthcoming mobile
technologies.
The Nocona Xeon processor will debut at 3.6GHz in the second
quarter with support for 64-bit extensions technology, said Mike
Fister, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's
enterprise platforms group.
It will also come with 1Mbyte of Level 2 cache, an 800MHz
front-side bus and will support three different operating modes:
pure 32-bit mode, a combination 64-bit/32-bit mode, and a pure
64-bit mode.
The Xeon MP server processor line will also receive the
extensions technology enhancement next year, as it will take more
time to validate the new technologies with large, multiprocessor
servers, he said.
Intel embedded the extensions technology into the Prescott core
recently released as the newest Pentium 4 desktop processor, and
can turn it on when it feels the market is ready, said Ajay
Malhotra, general manager of enterprise marketing at Intel.
Prescott-based processors with the extensions technology will be
released later this year for workstations and single-processor
servers, but Intel did not disclose the brand identities of those
chips. Server and workstation processors are the sole focus of the
extensions technology for now, Malhotra said.
Intel also released a 3.2GHz Xeon processor with 2Mbytes of
cache. Older Xeon processors had just 1Mbyte of cache.
Two new Itanium processors designed for two-way servers will
ship this year with 3Mbytes of cache at 1.4GHz and 1.6GHz. This
line of dual-processor Itanium chips will continue into the future
with the Millington processor in 2005, and the multicore Dinoma
processor will be released some time after Millington.
The standard Itanium processor for multiprocessor servers will
have two cores in 2005 with the introduction of Montecito. Fister
revealed a few details about the Bayshore chipset that will come
with Montecito. Bayshore makes use of a faster front-side bus,
double data rate memory, and PCI Express.
Montecito will also come with two new technologies. Pellston is
the code name for new cache reliability technology, and Foxton
represents the multicore, multithreaded approach Intel is taking to
improve performance.
Pellston allows the chip to detect errors in the cache memory
banks and shut down the problematic parts of the cache before they
can cause problems. Foxton is a method of temporarily boosting the
clock speed of a multicore processor to take advantage of unused
execution units.
Further down the road, Intel will make the platform costs of
Xeon and Itanium identical. That means that after purchasing the
chip, it will cost a server supplier the same amount of money to
build the chipset and peripheral components for either Xeon servers
or Itanium servers. Right now, an Itanium server costs more to
manufacture.
Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM all announced they would release
systems based on Nocona when it becomes available. For HP and Dell,
the processor will be their first with 64-bit extensions to the x86
instruction set, while IBM will now sell servers based on Nocona
and Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron chip.
Dell has backed the idea of 64-bit extensions for more than a
year, but waited to introduce a product because it did not think
Opteron has seen enough demand outside of the high-performance
market, said Neil Hand, director of worldwide marketing for Dell's
enterprise systems group.
HP's situation is a little more complicated by the fact that it
already has a 64-bit strategy with the Itanium processor. But
Itanium and Opteron are aimed at two very different markets, and HP
has seen a lot of interest in 64-bit extensions technology, said
Donald Jenkins, vice president of marketing for business critical
servers at HP.
The only company that has jumped on board with both Intel and
AMD is IBM. Years of experience with a broad product portfolio has
prepared IBM to sell similar products to its customers, said Alex
Yost, director of product marketing for IBM's xSeries servers. IBM
sells high-end servers based on Itanium and its own Power4+ chip,
he said.
Customers running certain types of applications will have a
better experience with Opteron, while Nocona might be more
applicable for a different type of customer, Yost said. In the end,
the decision to sell both products benefits end users who now can
compare the two products side by side and make the best decision
for their needs, he said.
Later, Intel vice president and general manager Anand
Chandrasekher highlighted the progress Intel has made with its
Centrino mobile technology.
The 90-nanometer version of the Pentium M mobile processor,
known as Dothan, is set to launch in the second quarter. The chip
was delayed from an expected first-quarter launch after Intel
discovered a "quality issue" that it needed to fix.
Dothan will be followed by the launch of the Sonoma package in
the second half of this year. Sonoma updates the Centrino package
of the Pentium M, a mobile chipset and a wireless chip with Dothan,
a new chipset known as Alviso, and a wireless chip with support for
the three major 802.11 standards.
Intel also showed off some notebook reference designs using the
Sonoma technology. Newport and Florence are concept devices that
Intel licenses to interested notebook manufacturers.
Newport has been around for a while, and products based on that
design will appear later this year from Legend Group, Chandrasekher
said. Newport allows notebook users to view information such as
battery life or wireless network signal strength via a small screen
attached to the cover of a notebook.
Notebooks based on Florence are a little further away from
release. Three Florence designs were shown, including a 17-inch
mobile entertainment PC that uses a wireless keyboard with a
built-in remote control and voice over Internet Protocol phone.
Intel also unveiled a new four-way server blade, the Xeon
MP-based Server Compute Blade SBX44 and built in collaboration with
IBM.
Tom Krazit writes for IDG News
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