YOU"RE PROBABLY wondering what happened to the 800MHz front side bus Xeons that Intel was promising its customers they"d see early this year. We know we are, so we decided to ask some people and some Intel partners just what the flipping heck isn"t going on. It now appears to be some time before Intel launches its 1M 3.6GHz 800FSB Xeon at $850, its 3.4GHz one at $695, its 3.2GHz one at $450, its 3.0GHz one at $315 and its 2.8GHz one at $210.
And it won"t be until much later in the year that it will introduce its 3.8GHz 1MB Xeon at $850. But the firm will cut prices on a whole raft of those old fashioned 533MHz Xeons with 1MB of memory at the end of May, with price drops averaging $150 or so as it moves to discount them. What"s the problem? It"s partly to do with its engineering efforts on 64-32 bit emulation, as it struggles to meet the promises Dr Craig Barrett made at the Intel Developer Forum in February.