Tony & Intel Investors - Many of Intels Coppermine Customers to use a Chip Set made by Reliance Computing in their Coppermine Servers.
Coppermine-based servers from IBM, Compaq, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard all will use a chipset from Reliance Computing Corporation (RCC), not Intel, to enable the CPU to talk to the rest of the computer. That's a setback for Intel's push to sell manufacturers more parts of a PC's innards.
Sounds like Intel has lost some KEY accounts with their muddled chip set strategy - but they hae at least retained the CPU design wins.
Paul
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Coppermine launch to spark servers, Rambus workstations
By Stephen Shankland
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
October 21, 1999, 9:55 p.m. PT
URL: news.cnet.com
Major computer manufacturers will unveil high-end systems Monday based on Intel's new Pentium III processors, but the debut won't be a total victory for the chipmaking giant.
Code-named "Coppermine," the upgraded Pentium III chips bring dramatic performance improvements of more than 10 percent over existing designs, analysts and manufacturers say. But in many leading computer makers' systems, the phrase "Intel Inside" will apply only to the central processing unit (CPU).
Coppermine-based servers from IBM, Compaq, Dell, and Hewlett-Packard all will use a chipset from Reliance Computing Corporation (RCC), not Intel, to enable the CPU to talk to the rest of the computer. That's a setback for Intel's push to sell manufacturers more parts of a PC's innards.
In addition, timing isn't all that could be desired. Although some Coppermine-based systems will be available at the same time as Intel's official announcement Monday, others won't actually arrive for weeks or even months.
"This is a less-than-perfect launch from a logistics standpoint than we've seen in the past," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst with Insight 64.
The new Coppermine chips substantially boost higher-end servers and workstations, largely because the chips come with high-speed memory called cache built into the chip itself, a method Intel first used with its low-end Celeron chips. The chips also benefit from a big increase in clock speed, with chips running as fast as 733 MHz set to debut.
In comparative terms, Coppermine chips running at the same clock speed as today's Pentium IIIs are about 10 percent faster, Brookwood said. Combined with the higher clock speed, Dell said it's seeing performance jump of 15 to 25 percent.
Computer makers are further smiling about the Coppermine's 133-MHz "frontside bus," the data pathway that transmits information to and from the chip. That improvement speeds communication with memory as well as components critical to server performance, such as disk drives and network cards.
Servers emerging gradually
As to the RCC chipset, companies are using it in Coppermine-based servers for a variety of reasons. Among them is the fact that Intel's 840 chipset uses Rambus memory, which costs more than conventional memory. In servers using a lot of memory, that price differential adds up.
"We believe [Rambus memory] is not ready for servers yet," but Dell will adopt it in servers in 2000, said Dell's Subo Guha.
Over the next few weeks, Coppermine servers gradually will emerge from the major manufacturers.
IBM will refresh its Netfinity 5600 server line with Coppermine chips in late November, but customers with 5600s today will be able to upgrade them, said Alex Yost, a marketing manager for IBM's Netfinity line of Intel servers. In addition, IBM has shipped nearly 100 of the new servers to some of its big customers, he said.
Compaq's Coppermine-based servers will show up in the first quarter of 2000, a spokesman said. Hewlett-Packard's Coppermine-based servers won't be available at launch, but will be coming in a few weeks, a spokesperson said.
Dell will refresh its existing PowerEdge 2300 and 4300 servers with the new chips, but will phase those models out at the end of the first quarter, said Guha. Replacing the 2300 will be the new 2400, which Dell is using to spearhead its latest attack on IBM, Compaq, and HP.
The 2400 will have a built-in ability to talk to arrays of hard disks ganged together in "RAID" configurations that protects data from loss, Guha said. While other manufacturers have done this already, Dell will do it at lower cost, he said. The built-in RAID system will use Intel's i960 communications chip.
Interestingly, the deployment of RCC's LE64 chipset will be the first time Dell has used a non-Intel chipset, Guha said.
RCC, unsurprisingly, is pleased with its chipset's success. "This is our third-generation design," said David Pulling, vice president of marketing. A lot of the work RCC did in pushing 133-MHz conventional memory now is paying off, he said.
Rambus revival
Though RCC won in servers, Intel's new 840 "Carmel" chipset will appear in Coppermine workstations, enabling the use of Rambus memory for the first time.
The next-generation Rambus memory technology was supposed to debut last month, but its arrival was derailed because of a bug in Intel's 820 chipset, a little brother to the 840.
Systems based on the 820 are likely to start shipping in middle to late November, said Keith Lefebvre, director of product marketing for Compaq's workstation division.
But Compaq workstations using Rambus and the 840 chipset will be shipping in "less than a month," Lefebvre said. Lower-end workstations using current Intel chipsets and Coppermine chips will be available immediately.
The new models will be the first to emerge under a reorganization of Compaq's workstation division that merged it with the business-oriented DeskPro desktop computer line. As a result of the joining of forces, the workstation line will be able to take advantage of the production, design, and distribution advantages from the DeskPro division, Lefebvre said.
Using Rambus memory shows a 5 to 10 percent performance improvement on typical jobs, but on some memory-intensive tasks, the workstations show a 17 or 18 percent improvement, Lefebvre said.
Industry sources said that IBM workstations with the 840 chipset and Rambus memory would be available in November. Micron Electronics also will debut Coppermine systems, but will use Via chipsets and ordinary SDRAM memory, a source familiar with the company's plans said.
By selecting selecting Via chipset instead of Intel's 820, Micron sidestepped the problem that afflicted other manufacturers last month.
In a related matter, at the same time that today's Pentium III chips are replaced with Coppermine models, Intel is replacing its Pentium III Xeon chips with new models that have been code-named Cascades. But until upgrades to Cascades arrive in 2000, the current models are virtually identical to the Coppermine.
IBM, for one, won't be using them. "There's no performance difference," said Yost.
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