Intel To Ship Next MP Processor in 3Q

Intel said Friday it will move up the ship date for Tulsa, its next CPU for multiprocessor servers, to the third quarter.

Intel originally had said Tulsa, aimed at four-way servers and above, was to ship toward the end of the second half of the year, said a spokesman for Intel, Santa Clara, Calif. Unlike Woodcrest, the latest Xeon processor for one- and two-way servers that is based on Intel's new Core Microarchitecture, Tulsa will be based on the older NetBurst Architecture, the spokesman said.

Intel's new Core architecture is designed to get performance gains by packing two CPUs running at lower clock speeds onto one die and increasing the number of tasks that can be run in parallel. It is considered by many solution providers as Intel's opportunity to gain back performance clout rival Advanced Micro Devices has been picking up with its speedy, power-efficient Opteron Processors.

Tulsa is intended to supersede the current Paxville multiprocessor CPUs, which many solution providers have said does not meet the price, performance per watt metric that is currently offered by AMD's Opteron. The spokesman said Tulsa will have a total of 16Mbyte of cache split between two cores to beef up performance. Current Paxville's are available with 2Mbytes or 4MBytes of cache, he said.