HP Says It Will Be First Out the Door with Gallatin Xeons

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hewlett-Packard this week said that it would be the first vendor to get servers out the door supporting Intel's future "Gallatin" Pentium 4 Xeon MP processors as it rolled out two new servers. The Gallatin chips are the kickers to the "Foster" Xeon MP, and both chips are designed to be used in machines with four or more processors and which have workloads that crave large L2 cache memories.

The Gallatin chip was originally expected in early 2002, then early 2003, and now we hear possibly late 2002. The Gallatins are made with a 0.13 micron chip process that allows 1 MB or 2 MB L3 caches to be integrated on the chips and either a 256 KB or 512 KB L2 cache as well. The Gallatins are expected to run at 1.5 GHz to 2 GHz, and will support a 400 MHz quad-pumped system bus. Larger L3 caches could come down the pike in 2003 or 2004, according to Intel's plans about 18 months ago, but Intel isn't talking about this now.

In any event, HP is saying that it will support the Gallatins in its relatively new ProLiant ML570 G2 rack-mounted servers, which use the Foster chips running at 1.4 GHz at the moment. The ML570 supports up to four processors and up to 32 GB of main memory and 1 TB of disk capacity in a 7U form factor. HP is telling ML570 customers that the machines will run as much as 80 percent faster running the Gallatins (presumably using the 2 GHz version) compared to the 1.4 GHz Fosters. The ML570 offers hot-add memory cards, but customers will need to be running Windows .NET Server 2003, Enterprise and Datacenter Server editions, to take advantage of these hot swap memory capabilities. HP is not providing pricing on the ML570 G2 server on its Web site, which probably means it really doesn't want to sell these machines until Gallatin and Windows .NET Server 2003 are in productions--unless customers are really dying to get their hands on one and are willing to pay a premium.

HP has also announced the DL380 G3 server, its third generation of two-way ProLiant DL380 machines. This server uses the "Prestonia" Pentium 4 Xeon processor (running at either 2.4 GHz or 2.8 GHz) rather than the Fosters or Gallatins, and it is available immediately. The DL380 motherboard is based on the ServerWorks GC-LE chipset and comes with 512 MB of main memory that is expandable to 6 GB and up to 437 GB of internal disk storage (that's six 73 GB drives). A DL380 G3 with a single 2.4 GHz chip (with 512 KB of L2 cache), 512 MB of main memory, and an 18 GB disk sells for $3,718 direct from HP; the same machine with a single 2.8 GHz chip costs $4,018.

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