As expected, Intel Corp made the latest moves to expand its market reach up to high-end workstations and servers yesterday with the launch of the Pentium III Xeon family. Along with the Xeons, Intel also announced the Profusion chipset that enables it to offer its OEMs standard high-volume server technology with up to eight CPUs.
Xeon chips will initially come with a speed of 500MHz, in 512KB, 1MB and 2 MB Level 2 cache versions for two and four-way servers and workstations. At the moment, Intel’s chipset only scales to four-way systems, but Profusion, due to ship in the second quarter, will enable systems that are expandable up to eight CPUs. The first eight-way products are due around the third quarter, with four-processor entry-level systems including the eight-way, Profusion-enabled boards likely to cost between $15,000 and $17,000, faster and substantially cheaper than equivalent Risc-based systems, according to Intel. All the 500MHz Xeons have been validated for up to eight processors. A 550MHz version with 512KB Level 2 cache for two-way workstations will ship next month, but 1Mb and 2Mb 550MHz versions, intended for four and eight-way servers, won’t ship until the third quarter. Intel is still promising a 600MHz plus version by the end of the year.
Like the standard Pentium IIIs launched a few weeks ago, the new Xeons include Intel’s new Internet Streaming SIMD instruction set extensions. While this offers workstation vendors demonstrable performance benefits, server manufacturers are likely to see most of the performance gains from the faster clock speeds and larger caches. Intel insists that both database and TCP/IP communications performance can be boosted through using the new instructions. Patrick Buddenbaum, Intel’s Xeon product marketing manager, claimed internet, database and streaming media application performance on servers was boosted by between 5% and 10%.
Intel said OEMs including, among others, Bull, Compaq, Dell, Fujitsu, Gateway, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intergraph, Quantex, Pionex Technologies, Siemens and Silicon Graphics plan to begin shipping workstations and servers based on the Pentium III Xeon processor shortly. The chip costs (in 1,000 unit quantities) $931 for the 500MHz version with 512 KB L2 cache; $1,980 for the 500MHz with 1MB L2 cache and $3,692 for the 500MHz with 2MB L2 cache.
