Scumbria, re: " It will be interesting to see what K7 is, and if it is a threat to Xeon pricing."
Xeon is intended for workstations and servers, which, especially in the case of servers, have quite a lot more requirements on the µP than do desktops. Which of these might the K7 have?
Very large L2 caches
SMP capability
Very low FIT rates (low tens failures in ten to the 9th hours).
Motherboard and node development based on the µP to support:
• Up to 4 GB or more memory
• Failover
• Clustering/Fabric interconnect
• Hot swappable hard drives, including RAID
• Hot swappable and redundant power supplies and fans
• JTAG
• ECC Memory
• Remote Management/Landesk server manager
- Power Cycle
- Boot
- Diagnostics
- Configuration/reconfiguration
- Software distribution
- Inventory
- Security - Chassis intrusion, password protection
- Event logging
- SNMP trap
• All regulatory compliances: UL, FCC, CE, VCCI, more.
Bottom line is that there is one helluva lot more to getting specified as the µP for a server than just Megahertz, but I'm sure you already knew that. So, isn't comparison of the K7 to Xeon awfully premature?
Tony |
