IGBT
Lifer
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Chips Killed
Intel also has killed Whitefield, a multicore Xeon processor for servers with four or more processors, McLaughlin said. It is being replaced by a new processor code-named Tigerton that will appear in 2007, the same time-frame in which Whitefield was expected to arrive.
Tigerton processors will use a high-speed interconnect technology that will allow each processor to connect directly to the server's chipset, McLaughlin said. Current Xeon processors in multiprocessor servers must share a front-side bus connection to the chipset in order to access data from system memory or I/O, a bottleneck that industry analysts have blamed for the current performance gap between Intel's server chips and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron processors.
Intel's next-generation architecture, announced by President and Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini in August, will be used as the blueprint for Tigerton. This architecture is based on low-power design principles used to build Intel's Pentium M processor for notebooks.
Whitefield had been expected to help tip the performance battle back toward Intel in 2007, but Tigerton should be even more powerful, McLaughlin said. AMD has enjoyed favorable reviews from industry analysts, and even companies such as Hewlett-Packard, for the performance of its Opteron server processors as compared to Intel's Xeon chips.
Intel is not specifying exactly how the Tigerton processors will connect to the server's chipset, such as whether they will use integrated memory or I/O controllers or a next-generation interconnect technology that Intel has vaguely discussed at previous Intel Developer Forums.
Chips Killed
Intel also has killed Whitefield, a multicore Xeon processor for servers with four or more processors, McLaughlin said. It is being replaced by a new processor code-named Tigerton that will appear in 2007, the same time-frame in which Whitefield was expected to arrive.
Tigerton processors will use a high-speed interconnect technology that will allow each processor to connect directly to the server's chipset, McLaughlin said. Current Xeon processors in multiprocessor servers must share a front-side bus connection to the chipset in order to access data from system memory or I/O, a bottleneck that industry analysts have blamed for the current performance gap between Intel's server chips and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s Opteron processors.
Intel's next-generation architecture, announced by President and Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini in August, will be used as the blueprint for Tigerton. This architecture is based on low-power design principles used to build Intel's Pentium M processor for notebooks.
Whitefield had been expected to help tip the performance battle back toward Intel in 2007, but Tigerton should be even more powerful, McLaughlin said. AMD has enjoyed favorable reviews from industry analysts, and even companies such as Hewlett-Packard, for the performance of its Opteron server processors as compared to Intel's Xeon chips.
Intel is not specifying exactly how the Tigerton processors will connect to the server's chipset, such as whether they will use integrated memory or I/O controllers or a next-generation interconnect technology that Intel has vaguely discussed at previous Intel Developer Forums.
