Intel on Wednesday said it would boost the clock speed of its quad-core Xeon processor, and introduce an upgraded chipset for workstation and high-performance computing. Executives with the Santa Clara, Calif., company said the clock speed of the recently released quad-core, 65nm dual-socket Xeon 5300 series would be increased to 3GHz from the current 2.66 GHz. The boost stemmed from customer requests for a faster quad-core server chipset. The 5300 series was Intel"s first crack at Xeon quad-core chips. The product line, which will get a refresh later this year, is also known by its code name, Clovertown.
In addition, the chipmaker said it would ship in the second half of the year a chipset with a faster front-side system bus. The FSB is a bi-directional bus that carries data between the CPU and other devices in the computer system, such as random access memory, hard disks and video cards. The chipset, code-named Seaburg, would have a 1600 MHz FSB versus 1333 MHz in Intel chipsets currently used in workstations and high-performance computing. "I would categorize it as a broad requirement (by customers)," Thomas Kilroy, vice president and general manager for Intel"s Digital Enterprise Group, said of the speed boost during a press briefing in San Francisco.