Intel Launches Revved-Up Xeon MP

End users should see a 15 percent to 25 percent performance increase when using systems powered by Intel Corp.’s upgraded Xeon MP processor, company officials said Tuesday.

At a press conference in New York, Richard Dracott, general manager of enterprise marketing and planning for Intel’s Enterprise Platform Group, said the new “Gallatin” chips—which include a 3GHz version with 4MB of Level 3 cache, and 2.7GHz and 2.2GHz versions with 2MB of cache each—will help businesses looking to consolidate back-end applications onto fewer systems.

Pricing, in 1,000-unit quantities, for the new chips is $3,692 for the 3GHz processor, $1,980 for the 2.7GHz chip and $1,177 for the 2.2GHz version.

Dracott said the new chips—used in systems with four or more processors and compatible with existing systems—are an example of Intel “breathing new life into a platform that has been around for a few years.”

He also used the launch of the new chip as a way of highlighting the work Intel does around silicon, from chip sets to software tools to servers. All of them play a role in Intel architecture being used in the vast majority of the worldwide server market, he said. About 85 percent of the systems shipped use Intel architecture, accounting for almost 50 percent of server revenues, Dracott said.

Intel’s 64-bit Itanium chip will enable it to compete better in the high-end space now dominated by mainframes and RISC systems powered by Sun Microsystems Inc.’s SPARC and IBM’s Power processors, he said.

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