Intel plans to ship its first Xeon processors based on a
new dual-core architecture in 2006 rather than the
industry-expected 2005.
Last month, Intel president and chief operating officer Paul
Otellini seemed to indicate that the company planned to release its
first dual-core Xeon next year.
"In 2005, Intel will ship dual-core products into every one of
our key segments of the marketplace: desktop, servers and mobile
products in production next year," he said speaking at the Intel
Developer Forum.
However, Otellini's remarks did not refer to the company's Xeon
plans, said Intel spokesman Mike Houlihan. "There's definitely no
schedule change. We just hadn't disclosed a schedule previously,"
he said.
Intel has been vague about the dual-core Xeon product's delivery
date, partly in response to a memo sent in July from Intel CEO
Craig Barrett, which called on the company to change its methods
and improve the way it brings products to market, said Dean
McCarron, principal analyst with Mercury Research. Product delays
throughout the year have plagued Intel.
Another chip analyst said he had expected the dual-core Xeon in
2005. "I'm kind of surprised," said Kevin Krewell, editor in chief
of Microprocessor Report.
"What pushing [the ship date to] 2006 indicates to me is that
Intel has decided to wait until 2006 to build a chip with 65
nanometer, with more cache on board," he said, referring to the
65-nm technology Intel is now developing to build its
next-generation microprocessors.
While suppliers such as IBM and Sun Microsystems have already
begun shipping dual-core processors for their Unix systems,
Advanced Micro Devices and Intel have been locked in a race to be
the first x86 suppliers to bring this type of design, which places
two computational units, called cores, on the microprocessor.
AMD began demonstrating early implementations of its dual-core
Opteron at the end of August, and IBM already started shipping its
first server designed to support the AMD processors when those ship
in the middle of next year.
Intel, for its part, demonstrated a prototype of the dual-core
Pentium chip at the September Intel Developer Forum, and the
company is planning to release dual-core Itanium and Pentium
processors in 2005.
Both companies will begin shipping dual-core processors, in
fairly limited volume, in the middle of 2005, with numbers ramping
up in the next year, McCarron said.
However, with other suppliers also building chips for the x86
instruction set, it is possible that neither Intel nor AMD will be
the first to market with a dual-core x86 processor, McCarron
said.
Robert McMillan writes for IDG News Service