Intel unveils its plans for servers
Intel has wide ranging plans to capture the high-end server market, after its roadmap for many product areas up to the year 2000 was revealed.
According to documents seen by PC Dealer, Intel will have a 1.2GHz microprocessor, which incorporates a fast bus design based on Digital Alpha Risc-like technology, by the year 2000.
The processor, codenamed Williamette, will initially come in 0.18 micron process technology but will be shrunk to 0.13 micron during its lifetime.
It will initially arrive in an 800MHz flavour, but that will rise during the year 2000 to 1.2GHz.
Intel will begin to flesh out its plans for symmetric multiprocessing servers as early as this June, according to the documents. Slot 2 architecture using the 450NX chipset will arrive in June, supporting four-way interleaved memory, Hot Plug PCI and up to 2Mb of L2 cache memory.
Prices are expected to be $4,500 for the 2Mb version, about $3,000 for the 1Mb unit and about $1,500 for the 512Kb L2 version, when bought in units of 1,000. Intel also has a reference design for Slot 2 server motherboards which it will unveil in June. Sources added that the Pentium MMX processor was likely to disappear this August.
While Intel has already revealed that it has a 300MHz Celeron waiting in the wings, autumn will also bring other announcements, including its Marlinspike project, believed to be a Slot 2 reference design using a 440GX chipset.
That will support up to 2Gb of memory in four different dual inline memory modules (DIMM) configurations. The company will also then introduce its PII/450MHz chip, expected to cost about $450.
The company also has another revision of its i740 graphics chip on the way. Known as Portola, this will offer higher speeds, coupled with the faster bus Intel will introduce. It is expected to make changes to the reference design for PC98, with a view to ridding PCs of ISA slots.
In the fourth quarter of this year, Intel will produce its Saber project, based on Corollary's Profusion technology and aimed at the eight-way SMP market.
In the first half of 1999, IBM will introduce its Geyserville technology, intended to support even thinner notebooks, running at under four watts and in a different form factor to the product it previewed at Cebit last week. Intel has further plans to improve its notebook technology with its Colfax product, which will include AGP support and Firewire technology.