CeBIT: Intel shows 500MHz Pentium III Xeon servers

Intel presented its Pentium III Xeon Processor at CeBIT today. The manufacturer's fastest microprocessor is designed for mid-range and high-end servers as well as workstations. For the time being, the PIII-Xeon comes with a processor speed of 500 MHz. A 550 MHz version is expected in April.

Together with the new Xeon, Intel also introduced the Profusion chipset, enabling high performance servers to support up to 8 processors. Compaq, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intergraph Computer Systems, Maxdata, Silicon Graphics and Siemens all display their latest workstations loaded with PIII-Xeon chips at CeBIT. Supported operating systems include Windows, SCO Unixware, Solaris, Netware and Linux.

According to Intel vice-president Pat Gelsinger, the PIII-Xeon offers distinctly higher performance results than the fastest comparable RISC processors. Like the "normal" Pentium-III chips, the new PIII-Xeons dispose of over 70 new instructions described as "Internet Streaming SIMD Extensions" (SIMD stands for "Single Instruction Multiple Data"). On workstations and servers the instructions improve and speed up video- and audio data transfer and processing via TCP/IP up to 10%, says Gelsinger.

The microprocessor group is at the centre of 9.5 million transistors based on Intel's P6 micro-architecture. Pentium III Xeon processors are currently available with a speed of 500 MHz and L2 cache sizes of 512 KBytes, 1 MByte or 2 MBytes.

Thanks to ZDNet Germany for this report. Translated by Sophie Handrick

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