The new chips--formerly code-named Gallatin--are enhanced versions of Intel's Xeon line for multiprocessor servers. The fastest of the new chips runs at 2GHz and contains a 2MB tertiary cache, a reservoir of memory for rapid data access. The older Xeon, which came out in March, tops out at 1.6GHz and has a 1MB cache.
"The performance speed-up is in the 20 (percent) to 38 percent range" on various applications, said Lisa Graff, director of enterprise processor marketing at Intel. "Cache (has) a huge impact on performance."
IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Dell Computer, among others, will adopt the chips fairly rapidly, as the new chips cost the same as the older Xeons and can fit into existing servers without a great deal of re-engineering.
The four- and eight-processor server market has become the primary battleground in the war between Sun and Intel. Servers made with Intel chips running Windows or Linux dominate the one- and two-processor segment.
Servers running RISC (reduced instruction set computer) chips such as Sun's UltraSparc III, and Unix operating systems, though, still dominate the more lucrative parts of the market.
RISC servers still account for 60 percent of server revenue worldwide, according to figures from research firm IDC, although they make up only 12 percent of units shipped.
With the new Xeons, IBM and other companies say they can undercut and outperform Sun. Just as important, large organisations are increasingly willing to buy Intel-based machines for running large databases and other tasks historically allotted to RISC machines.
"We're getting a lot of customers coming from Sun to Intel on the x440," said Doug Outhout, director of high-performance xSeries servers at IBM. The x440 is IBM's high-end Intel machine and is capable of running 16 chips at once.
Sun could not be reached for comment.
Still, it's going to be one long, slow war. Sun, IBM and HP, which also sell RISC-Unix servers, continue to enhance the performance of their 16- and 32- processor machines while improving the value proposition on the lower-end boxes.
"The Unix market has really learned in the past year about doing things less expensively," Outhout said.
Jeff Hewitt, an analyst at Gartner, said that, except for IBM's x440, which is experiencing growth, most of the new Intel systems would probably be bought to replace existing four- and eight-processor servers.
2%
4%
