Leading chipmaker Intel Corp. has unwrapped some of its plans concerning the server and workstation processors and chipsets. The main headliners of Intel"s pedestal and rack server roadmap – Intel Xeon MP processor code-named Potomac and Intel"s dual-core chip code-named Smithfield – finally got their target clock-speeds and cache sizes from Intel"s official documents.
Intel Xeon MP Platform Gets 3.50+GHz Speeds, 8MB Caches. Intel"s Xeon processor family for multiprocessor (MP) applications will finally be updated in Q1 2005 with chips code-named Cranford that contain 1MB of L2 cache, but operate at 3.66GHz, much higher than today"s 3.0GHz. In server environments clock-speed does not necessarily mean performance crown, as server software is seriously dependant on cache size and from that perspective Intel"s Xeon MP 3.0GHz with 4MB L3 cache may be a better choice for certain types of server deployments. Still, the processors code-named Cranford are to be made using 90nm process technology, which may allow Intel Corp. to set a bit lower prices on such products compared to previously released Intel Xeon MP processors at launch.