Intel puts server market on back burner

Necrosis

From "the inquirer"

the inquirer: Intel puts server market on back burner

Intel puts server market on back burner

To stew, quietly
By Mike Magee, 31/05/2002 08:30:37 BST

WITH A VIRTUAL MONOPOLY this year in the 32-bit X86 server market, Intel could be accused of sitting on its laurels, wreathed in smiles.
But things are not all rosy in the garden and PC manufacturers are pretty fed up with slow progress on the server front.

Some even argue that Intel is deliberately holding back server technology in order to milk the mooing cash cow for every last drop of milk.

Perhaps a kinder term would be underserving the market.

Early in May we reported that Intel had shunted its "Gallatin" Xeons, processors with large 2MB and 1MB level three caches, from Q3 of this year into the first quarter of next year.

Meanwhile, until Q4 of this year, server customers won't be able to take advantage of the Plumas 533 system bus – with that being by far the biggest bottleneck on server systems.

And when Intel discovered a small problem with the 900MHz Cashcades Pentium III last year, exclusively reported here, it took it ages and ages to fix it.

We also reported that Intel had decked its Pentium III 1.53/512K server chip, seeing as it was embarrassingly fast compared to its Pentium 4 "Xeons".

This trick of Intel is really fabulous, isn't it? You keep the brand name the same, while everything else about it is different. So we had Pentium II Xeons, Pentium III Xeons and now we've Pentium IV Xeons, but their characteristics, apart from the word "Xeon" are remarkably different.

As these chips are being sold to people building systems who understand what they're doing, do they really need this smokescreen covering their characteristics?

The Intel roadmap shows that until Gallatin comes out, Intel is dependent on its Xeon MP processor, using the ServerWorks, that is Broadcom, GC-HE chipset and that's underpinning the Gallatin introductions next year as well.

The Xeon MP, which as we reported earlier this week has a long list of bugs already attached to it, is also positioned by Intel as an eight way server processor, but we wonder how many systems we'll see that use the current feeble 1MB Level Three cache version.

Surely, any PC company in its right mind is waiting for Gallatin?

It also, of course, positioning the Itanic 2 (McKinley) at 1GHz and with 3MB of level three cache as an eight way system, using the E8870 chipset.

Will we see many such eight way systems being sold during 2002? We don't believe so.

And next year, if AMD delivers, there will be eight way Opterons oot and aboot. Can Intel really afford to sit on its laurels on the server front? µ