Officials at Intel Corp. said the company is currently shipping a version of its new 2.2-GHz Northwood processor, called “Prestonia,” to customers.
According to resellers, rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., is scheduled to ship a “Model 2000+” version if its Athlon MP processor by February, and perhaps later this month.
Prestonia is virtually identical to the Northwood processor that was officially introduced on Monday. Both Prestonia and Northwood run a 2.2-GHz and above, and are characterized by a 0.13-micron process and the inclusion of 512-Kbytes of level-2 cache. However, Prestonia is designed for two-way workstations, while the Northwood chip is designed for PCs.
Officially, the chip is being referred to as a 2.2-GHz Xeon for workstations, said a spokesman for Intel Corp., Santa Clara, Calif., in an email.
“OEMs now have the product and will be rolling it out in systems throughout Q1 and Q2,” he wrote.
A combination of a new Xeon part for servers and the “Plumas” chipset is due later in the first quarter, he said. According to report from last years Intel Developers Forum, the Plumas chipset supports PCI-X and can connect to an Infiniband bridge chip.
Another “large cache” Xeon part–informally known as “Foster MP” and eventually “Xeon MP”) is also due for servers in the first quarter with a chipset manufactured by ServerWorks, part of Broadcom Corp.
Editors Note: A previous version of this story and a previous headline incorrectly stated that Intel was shippoing the new Prestonia processor for two-way servers.
