Exit Pentium Pro, Enter Xeon

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June 29, 1998 (10:28 AM EDT)

By Andy Patrizio,

Intel marks the end of the Pentium Pro and the beginning of Intel's push into enterprise computing Monday with the release of the Pentium II Xeon chips.

The Xeon family is not significantly different from the current Pentium II line because it uses the same P6 core and 100-Mhz input/output bus. But the Xeon does have a larger cache -- up to 2 megabytes of Level 2 cache -- which runs at the same clock speed as the central processing unit (CPU).

Current Pentium II chips have 512K of cache, which run at half the clock speed of the CPU. The Celeron, designed for inexpensive home PCs, has no cache.

Like previous Pentium chips, the Xeon is targeted at workstations and servers. It replaces the Pentium Pro, which never caught on in the consumer market, but has found a niche in the 4-, 8-, and 16-way server market.

Pricing for the Xeon will not be as high as previous reports, which said the chips would sell for up to $4,500 each. In lots of 1,000, the 400-Mhz Xeon -- with 512K of cache -- will sell for $1,124 each, while the 1-MB cache version will sell for $2,836, said Intel spokesman Manny Vara.

By contrast, the 200-Mhz Pentium Pro with 512K of cache is $1,035, and the 1-MB cache version sells for $2,675. So customers can look forward to more than twice the performance for the same price, said Vara.

The prices are well in line with the performance of the chip, said Mel Thomson, director of consulting with MicroDesign Resources. Xeon will be a worthy competitor to other CPUs, he added.

"Intel will be in [the] thick of the hunt -- even without Merced," Thomson said. "My guess is Intel's strategy is to begin participating in the market, get themselves established, win some big accounts, tell people about Merced, and start laying the groundwork to start converting these people ... to the bigger thing later."

Xeon does have some new technologies designed for enterprise servers, where the chips are aimed. One of the more significant functions is PSE36, 36-bit memory addressing technology that lets a Xeon chip access up to 64 GBs of memory, according to Vara. The Pentium II, by contrast, can only access 4 GBs of memory.

The 450NX chip set, which will be built into all first-generation Slot 2 motherboards, can only address up to 8 GBs of memory. Future chip sets will be able to take full advantage of the 64-GB range.

It's the memory and cache that provide Xeon with its horsepower. With the increased memory range, applications will gain anywhere from 10 percent to 15 percent in performance. The larger cache also provides around a 10 percent to 14 percent performance boost over a Pentium II at the same clock speed, said Vara.

Also new in the Xeon, and in other Intel (company profile) chips, is technology to stop "overclocking," Vara said. The technology is not aimed at hobbyists who like to fiddle with their systems, but counterfeiters who overclock CPUs and sell them as faster machines than they actually are.