New Intel chip lifts high-end servers
C|Net | at | by Mike
Intel's high-end servers stand to get a big boost from the relentless forward march of processor technology. The company on Tuesday launched the Xeon MP processor, its latest chip for multiprocessor servers using four or more chips. The new Xeon MP chip offers nearly twice the clock speed of the chip it will replace, the 900MHz Pentium III Xeon chip that it introduced a year ago.
Xeon MP, to debut at speeds of 1.4GHz, 1.5GHz and 1.6GHz, gets its extra performance from Intel's NetBurst processor architecture, the same silicon that is behind the Pentium 4. However, the Xeon MP also packs a few server-oriented enhancements, including an on-chip Level 3 cache of up to 1MB, and Intel's hyper-threading technology, which allows a single chip to nearly mirror the performance of two. The cache stores important data closer to the processor core, speeding performance.