Intel has some good news for power users and early adopters: Paxville will arrive early.
The chip giant says availability of its dual-core Xeon processors (code-named Paxville) will be later this year rather than 2006 as originally planned. Intel said Paxville will provide more than 60 percent better performance over previous generations.
For dual-processor servers, Intel plans to ship a premium dual-core Intel Xeon processor, codenamed “Paxville DP” later this year. By Intel’s estimates, Paxville DP will deliver up to 50 percent improved performance over previous generations.
“We expect to have systems available this year based on Paxville,” said Dell spokesperson David Lord. “We’re making an aggressive push to get dual-core across our entire portfolio and this is another great piece of that for anyone interested in a performance boost.”
Intel has been feeling the heat from rival AMD
, which has moved aggressively into dual-core with its Opteron processor for the server market.
“Intel still is clearly trailing AMD as far as dual-core on servers,” said Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata, in a recent interview with internetnews.com. “Intel has dual-core for the desktop but the [main dual-core] benefit now is on the server side.”
Not one to sit still, Intel’s latest moves show it’s ready to respond aggressively to the competition. Paxville DP is targeted at early adopters and evaluators of dual-core technology. Intel plans to follow Paxville with a broader family of dual-core Intel Xeon processor-based platforms, codenamed “Bensley” for servers and “Glidewell” for workstations, in the first quarter of 2006.
Intel has 17 multi-core projects under development and said it expects more than 85 percent of its server volume to be multi-core processors by the end of 2006. In addition to the Intel Xeon processors due in 2005, Intel began shipping the dual-core Intel Pentium D processor for uni-processor servers in July 2005, and said it remains on track to begin shipping dual-core Intel Itanium processors by the end of the year.
Both the 64-bit Paxville and Paxville DP processors will include Execute Disable Bit
Today’s announcement comes a week ahead of the Intel Developer Forum where the company will unveil a new high-performance chip architecture due out the second half of next year.
Rob Chapman, general manager of IDF, confirmed that dual- and multi-core announcements, along with energy efficiency, will be major themes at the event.
According to analysts, the new platforms would include “Merom” (multi-core for mobile), and Conroe (multi-core for desktop systems sporting a four-core architecture).
