Guild Companies

Intel last week announced that it is able to ship faster versions of its "Prestonia" Pentium 4 Xeon processors for two-way capable workstations and servers. The original Prestonias made their debut in February of this year, and Intel says that it is able to get out 2.6 GHz and 2.8 GHz versions of the chips about three months ahead of schedule. In the modern computer business, shipping a chip on time is a cause for celebration, so doing it early is truly remarkable.

The two new Prestonia Xeon processors are manufactured using the latest a 0.13 micron processes that Intel is just starting to perfect and which debuted with the 1.8 GHz. 2 GHz, and 2.2 GHz Prestonias in February (see the February 27 edition of Guild Companies, Windows and Linux Edition, for more details on the initial Prestonias). A few months ago, Intel snuck out a 2.4 GHz version of the chips. The 2.6 GHz and 2.8 GHz versions of the chips offer twice as much power as the entry Prestonias that debuted only six months ago. Intel got these faster chips out the door to keep pace with rival Advanced Micro Devices, which is making incursions into the two-way server and workstation market with its "Thoroughbred" Athlon MP 2200+ processors, which run at 1.8 GHz.

As we described back then, the Prestonia chips are a follow-on to the 32-bit Pentium 4 Xeon "Foster" processors, which are aimed at four-way and larger configurations. The Prestonia chips had the highest clock speeds for servers when they debuted earlier this year, and with the two latest cranks on the clock, the Prestonias have put lots of water between themselves and other chip architectures when it comes to clock speed. CPU cycles don't always make a big difference with applications--some applications are more dependent on I/O or memory bandwidth--but for compute-intensive applications written in Java, C++, or Fortran, two-way Prestonia servers are great machines.

The Prestonia chips are the first of Intel's chips to support a technology that Intel calls Hyper-Threading, but which the computer industry has for over 40 years called Simultaneous Multi-Threading. SMT was invented for supercomputers in the 1960s, and it involves virtualizing the instruction pipelines in a chip, in this case the Pentium 4 Xeon processor, and allows them to be presented to compilers in such a way that it looks like two processors instead of one, at least as far as the operating system is concerned. SMT can yield performance improvements of between 15 percent and 30 percent without adding any clock cycles or transistors to a chip.

When the Prestonias were announced in February, the 1.8 GHz version cost $251, the 2 GHz chip cost $417, and the 2.2 GHz chip cost $615 (all in 1,000-unit quantities, as usual). Intel has apparently killed off the 1.8 GHz and 2 GHz version of the Prestonias, and it is now selling the 2.2 GHz and 2.4 GHz chips for an incredibly low $224. (Yes, they have the same price). The new 2.6 GHz chip costs $433, while the 2.8 GHz chip costs $562.