Network Computing is part of the Informa Tech Division of Informa PLC

This site is operated by a business or businesses owned by Informa PLC and all copyright resides with them. Informa PLC's registered office is 5 Howick Place, London SW1P 1WG. Registered in England and Wales. Number 8860726.

Intel's New Tulsa Chip Bolsters Fight With AMD: Page 2 of 3

While Tulsa has been highly anticipated, it actually arrives to market six months or more ahead of the original target date of the first quarter of 2007, Skaugen says.

"We have now refreshed the entire [server processor] roadmap with 23 different MPUs in 100 days, which is unprecedented," he says.

Major server manufacturers Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM all announced new systems based on Tulsa, demonstrating that prior introductions for the multiprocessor server market based on AMD's Opteron market were incremental introductions and not replacements of Intel-based designs, Skaugen says.

Tulsa represents up to a four times improvement in performance per CPU dollar, he says. The prior high-end Xeon processor for multi-processor servers was priced at $3,150, while the new high-end Tulsa is priced at $1,980.

The dual-core Xeon 7100, code-named Tulsa, uses a 16-Mbyte shared level 3 cache, the largest on-chip memory processors for Intel in the x86 market. The processors also are socket compatible with Intel's existing multiprocessor server platforms.