Enterprise Update

Mike Fister, Senior VP and General Manager of the Enterprise Platforms Group presented the audience with announcements of what products to expect this year. Continuing from Intel’s leadership in the server market, Intel will continue to bring faster and higher performance processors to the low-end server and workstation market. Poised to be released the next half of this year are Intel Xeon processors clocked at 3.06GHz and Intel would later reveal a Xeon DP version with 1MB of L2 cache in the third quarter. Moving together with the mobile and desktop manufacturing technology, the Xeon will also adopt Intel’s 90nm manufacturing technology with the next generation of Xeon processors codenamed Nocona. Intel did not reveal the speed at which Nocona would operate but what we know is that it will also come with 1MB of cache.

Mike Fister, Senior VP and GM for Enterprise Platforms Group.

At the Xeon MP front, there has been a lot of development and adoption of multiprocessing servers in 2002 and Intel expects this to continue way into 2004. Fister shared that by the second half of this year, Intel will ship Xeon MP processors running at more than 2GHz and by the first half of 2004, Intel will deliver Xeon MP processors with 4MB of L3 cache (double what we currently have today). Increasing the cache size would certainly boost the performance of the platform, especially with database-type applications. Further down the roadmap (in the second half of 2004), you can expect Intel to introduce a new MP platform that will take advantage of their new 90nm product codenamed Potomac. Unfortunately, Intel did not reveal any details at this point.