Thursday August 6 8:20 PM ET
Another delay in store for Intel's Xeon
PC Week
By Carmen Nobel, ZDNet
Intel Corp. is delaying shipment of the next version of its 450NX Xeon chip set for servers
until at least the beginning of 1999, company officials have confirmed.
The chip set, which can scale up to four processors on a server and can be configured with
as much as 2MB of cache and 8GB of main memory, was originally expected by October.
Dell Computer Corp. (Nasdaq:DELL) and Compaq Computer Corp. (NYSE:CPQ) last
week began shipping servers with the 400MHz version of the 450NX, which can support
between 512KB and 1MB of cache. Those servers had been delayed because of previously
reported bugs in the chip set that Intel (Nasdaq:INTC) has since fixed.
Intel officials in Hillsboro, Ore., said no new bugs had been discovered in the 450NX but
that they wanted more time to test the chip set in all possible configurations, to make sure
there aren't any bugs still to be discovered.
"They want to make sure that the chip set can work with all the weird conditions that it can
be exposed to," said Nathan Brookwood, an analyst at Dataquest Inc., in San Jose, Calif.
"There are a ton of possible configurations, and they take forever to validate."
The 450MHz Pentium II Xeon for workstations is still due before the end of the year,
officials said. |
