Eylon and all, Article...Intel's big chip road map - Desktop, mobile chip rollouts make for a busy year...
August 3, 1999
InfoWorld : Intel is planning a busy summer and early fall.
The chip maker is preparing to officially announce the launch date and pricing details for its eight-way Xeon processor for servers on Aug. 23; mobile Celeron processors on Sept. 15; and a new chip set for Pentium III, which will support 133-MHz front-side bus speeds and higher-speed memory, on Sept. 27.
In addition, this week Intel will announce the next performance bump for both its Pentium III and Celeron processors, which will reach speeds of 600 MHz and 500 MHz, respectively.
Major vendors such as Compaq, Dell, and IBM will simultaneously announce models that incorporate the new chips.
Intel on Aug. 23 will be introducing a 550-MHz version of its Xeon processor for servers, which will use the Profusion chip set for eight-way processing.
The processor and chip set will allow a maximum of 2MB of cache, have a 100- MHz front-side bus, include the Single Image Multiple Direction (SIMD) extensions for faster processing of multimedia files, and address as much as 64GB of main memory.
Until now, eight-way capability has been the domain of companies such as NEC, Sequent, Silicon Graphics, Sun, and Tandem, which address an IT space higher up in the enterprise and typically run systems with Unix.
NEC, for example, is currently shipping its Express HV 8600, which offers eight-way processing using its own Aqua II chip set and Level 3 cache.
However, Nathan Brookwood, chief analyst at Insight 64, in Saratoga, Calif., sees a potential conflict between chief financial officers (CFOs) wanting to be more mainstream and CIOs who are skeptical about the scalability and performance of the Intel solution, especially when running on a Microsoft- based operating system.
"When Windows 2000 and Profusion come out, even if the CFO twists the CIO's arm and says buy it, they are not just going to buy it. They are going to kick the tires and have a relatively slow uptake," Brookwood said.
According to Brookwood, doubling the number of processors does not mean doubling the performance, and IT managers will want to take their time testing these new systems.
The Intel product onslaught will continue on Sept. 15 when the company introduces the 433-MHz and 466-MHz mobile Celerons.
One analyst believes that the faster mobile Celeron processors are targeted at end-users whose interest may not go beyond processor performance.
"What Intel is doing is, they are playing a megahertz song with the users. They are taking the Celeron with a smaller cache than the Pentium IIs or IIIs, and doing a megahertz uplift. The result is that performance looks just like those Pentium II and Pentium III numbers," said Gerry Purdy, chief analyst at Mobile Insights, in Mountain View, Calif.
Finally, on Sept. 27, Intel will introduce the 820 chip set, which will enable a 133-MHz front-side bus as well as support the faster Rambus memory technology.
The Pentium IIIs to be introduced on that day will have speeds of 533 MHz and 600 MHz, even though a 600-MHz Pentium III will also be introduced this week. The faster system bus, however, makes the difference.
"The higher the core frequency of the processor, the more a slower bus begins to make a difference," Brookwood said. There will be about a 2 percent to 3 percent performance difference between two similar systems performing at the same clock speed when one has a faster bus, according to Brookwood.
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