Intel to Unveil Pentium III Xeon MPU : Targets servers, workstations

Electronic News, March 15, 1999 by Jonathan Cassell

Santa Clara, Calif.-Intel Corp. this week will roll out the Pentium III Xeon, furthering its strategy to proliferate the X86 architecture into the workstation and server markets.

The Pentium III Xeon is identical to the Pentium III in terms of microarchitecture, but will sport a larger cache and faster clock speed than current Pentium III devices. The new microprocessor will have a maximum second-level cache size of 2 Megabytes and an initial top clock speed of 550MHz. In comparison, the Pentium II Xeon has a maximum clock rate of 450MHz.

In addition to sporting a higher clock speed that previous Xeon microprocessors, the Pentium III Xeon features 70 new streaming SIMD instructions, some of which are intended to provide a performance boost for 3D graphics applications. Those instructions should will help reduce the cost of implementing 3D graphics, making the Pentium III Xeon more attractive for low-end workstation applications, according to analysts.

"This will help Intel's position in the graphics workstation market," said Dean McCarron, principal of Mercury Research Inc., Scottsdale, Ariz. "The workstation market uses a lot of graphics hardware that does a lot of the same things that the Pentium III Xeon can do. This will make Intel more competitive in the lower end of the segment, with the CPU performing tasks like transforms, lighting and 3D acceleration, instead of using dedicated hardware."

Intel is also expected to do well in the low end of the workstation business because the Xeon line is priced significantly lower than competing microprocessors from vendors such as Sun Microsystems.

With PC microprocessor prices eroding, the server and workstation markets present an attractive growth opportunity for Intel. Revenue from sales of X86 microprocessors into server market are expected to increase to $7.2 billion by 2002, up from $3.3 billion in 1998, according to the market research firm Dataquest, San Jose, Calif. X86 revenue into the workstation market is expected to grow to $15.8 billion in 2002, up from about $4.5 billion in 1998.

While X86 still represents only a small portion of the workstation microprocessor business, by the year 2002, X86 microprocessors will command more than 50 percent of that market. Intel is expected to have a commanding market share of X86 workstation microprocessors at least though 2002.

Like the previous Xeon microprocessors, the new chip will utilize a slot 2 connector, which supports a high-bandwidth bus between the microprocessor and the motherboard. The slot 2 connector is designed to overcome some of the performance deficit the Pentium III Xeon suffers from in comparison to other workstation microprocessors.