Kash Poor - More "MonoRail" Design Wins !
You will note that these are 450 MHz Xeons, Kash. Customers - Compaq, Dell, Gateway, IBM, Intergraph - are buying these products today and shipping systems this month.
These are not "samples", Kash-Poor. They are revenue producing products.
Paul
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Intel 450-MHz Xeon release prompts product flurry
By Nancy Weil and Andy Santoni
InfoWorld Electric
Posted at 9:33 AM PT, Oct 6, 1998
Intel's announcement Tuesday that its Pentium II Xeon 450-MHz processor is out prompted the usual and expected flurry of statements from vendors releasing workstations and servers that use the faster
chips.
The new Xeons are intended for dual-processor workstations and servers, and a bevy of vendors have said they will release machines running on the Xeon 450-MHz soon. The processor has a 512KB Level
2 cache and costs $824 in 1,000-unit quantities. Xeon 450-MHz processors for four-way servers are expected to be released early next year.
The lag in releasing the four-way processors will give Intel time to test the parts thoroughly and avoid the problems that plagued the 400-MHz Pentium II Xeon chips when they were announced in June, said
Nathan Brookwood, principal at consultancy Insight 64, in Saratoga, Calif.
While no computer buyer wants to deal with CPU problems, server buyers are especially concerned because of the critical nature of their application, Brookwood noted.
"Server buyers don't take lightly to glitches," Brookwood said.
In contrast, workstation buyers are more concerned with performance, said Raghu Murthi, director of product marketing at Intel's Workstation Products division, in Dupont, Wash.
"The workstation user is after ever-increasing performance," Murthi said.
Murthi expects that systems based on the 450-MHz Pentium II Xeon will cost $3,500 to $8,000, depending on configuration. He also expects these systems to compete with workstations that are
based on the Alpha processor or another of the RISC CPUs, and that cost $20,000 and up.
Murthi also noted that Intel has cut the price of the 400-MHz Pentium II Xeon to $824, the same price as the 450-MHz version. He does not foresee the slower part being designed into new systems.
"I expect [the 400-MHz CPU] to go away in new designs," Murthi said.
Some buyers have spent a great deal of time and money qualifying the 400-MHz Xeon part, and will not want to wait for the same process to be completed on the faster chip before they buy new systems, Murthi noted. As a result, Intel will need to keep the 400-MHz part in its catalog.
"We will support the 400 as long as there is demand," Murthi said.
In the meantime, various vendors released statements in conjunction with Intel's announcement Tuesday, including the following:
Compaq (www.compaq.com) will soon debut its Professional Workstation SP700 using the Xeon 450-MHz processor. Priced starting at $3,849, the workstation will offer a 4GB 10,000-rpm Wide-Ultra
SCSI hard drive, a graphics accelerator, and Windows NT 4.0 pre-installed.
Dell's (www.dell.com) Precision Workstation 610 line now comes in a Xeon 450-MHz version, priced starting at $3,266. For that price users get a single 450-MHz Xeon processor with a 512KB cache, a 4GB hard drive, 64MB of RAM, a CD-ROM, a graphics card, and a 17-inch monitor.
Gateway (www.gateway.com) released a new server and a workstation. The ALR 7300 server is for small businesses and costs $3,799 for a 4GB Ultra2 SCSI hard drive, 128MB of RAM, and one Xeon 450-MHz processor. The server uses Intel's new 440GX chip set enabling dual 450-MHz processors. The E-5250 workstation also uses the chip set. With one Xeon processor, 512KB of error-correcting
code L2 cache, 256MB of RAM, one 9GB 7200-rpm hard drive, a 21-inch monitor, a PCI 10/100 Ethernet controller, and an 8MB graphics card, the machine costs $4,999.
The TDZ 2000 GX1 ViZual Workstation line from Intergraph Computer Systems (www.intergraph.com/ics), a subsidiary of Intergraph Corp., supports the Xeon 450-MHz processor. The line is priced starting at $4,225 with 2GB of RAM, 100-MHz synchronous DRAM, and Wide Ultra2
LVD SCSI.
In addition, IBM (www.ibm.com) on Monday announced the Intellistation Z Pro, running Windows NT and powered by one or two 450-MHz Pentium II Xeon chips. It will be priced starting at about $4,150, and features a 100-MHz front side bus and 512KB of L2 cache.
Intel Corp., in Santa Clara, Calif., is at www.intel.com. |
