Intel, Sun Micro Roll Out Server Chips

Electronic News, March 26, 2001 by Jayant Mathew

INTEL CORP. LAST WEEK UNVEILED A 900MHz Pentium III Xeon microprocessor with 2Mbytes of cache targeted at four-way and eight-way multiprocessing systems. The chip will also be the last one based on the Pentium III processor. Intel (nasdaq: INTC) is slated to unveil the Pentium Xeon, another microprocessor that will be based on the Pentium 4 architecture, starting at 1.4GHz. The company is looking to build a brand out of Xeon and most analysts believe this makes sense as Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel tries to up the ante against server and workstation powerhouse Sun Microsystems Inc. The 900MHz PIII Xeon chips are priced at $3,692 each in 1,000-unit quantities.

Separately, Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW), Palo Alto, Calif., last week unveiled a midrange server powered by its UltraSparc III microprocessor, nearly six months after it introduced its first product based on the chip. Scott McNealy, chairman and chief executive officer of Sun, used the occasion to bash IBM Corp.'s servers and said that the Sun Fire servers featuring the UltraSparc III will fulfill data centers' life-critical computing needs. These midrange servers carry a price tag ranging from $73,195 to about $250,995 each.