News and New Products

Intel Looks to Server Future

By Richard Ball -- Electronics Weekly, 3/29/2005

Intel Corp. has announced a 64-bit, multi-processor platform for servers that provides an upgrade path for dual-core processors.

“This is more than just a CPU or chipset introduction,” said Alan Priestley, head of marketing for enterprise solutions at Intel. "It changes the way we architect our platforms."

The E8500 chipset supports four processors split across two independent front side busses, each with peak bandwidth of 5.3GBytes/sec. By raising the bus speed, and splitting the bus, bandwidth between CPUs and chipset is tripled.

External access from the chipset is via four channels of DDR2 memory at 400MHz. 40-bits of physical addressing allows for 64GBytes of main memory to be accessed.

The 64-bit Xeon processors are split into two lines, one with up to 8MByte of level three cache and the other with 1MByte of level two.

The platform also uses PCI-Express. “From a server perspective it’s a more robust platform,” explained Priestley.

Dual core Xeons, resulting in eight-way servers using the same chipset and motherboards, are expected next year. They are codenamed Paxville and Tulsa.

Electronics Weekly is the London-based sister publication of Electronic News.