Intel turns up the heat on Sun

Intel has released three new Xeon chips for four- and eight-processor servers in a move to increase the pressure on Sun Microsystems.

The new chips - formerly codenamed 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.

Lisa Graff, director of enterprise processor marketing at Intel, said: "The performance speed-up is in the 20 per cent to 38 per cent range on various applications. Cache has a huge impact on performance."

Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM, 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. These servers start at $6,000 and can cost more than $100,000 when fully configured.

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.

Michael Kanellos writes for News.com