Intel's Xeon arrives this Summer

The Xeon still isn't the eight-way parallel Corollary multi-processor which the industry was hoping for but it will be the fastest Pentium II system for transaction processing applications, effectively replacing the Pentium Pro as the ideal server machine for most buyers.

Xeon is in every way a standard Pentium II but the second level cache, which runs on a secondary chip in the processor module, is running twice as fast.

In the normal Pentium II the secondary cache runs at half the clock speed of the processor. In Xeon it will run at full clock speed. "A dual Xeon server should easily outperform a quad Pentium Pro on server applications, and transaction processing council benchmarks," said an Intel executive today.

By the end of this year Intel is promising an eight-way Xeon server with 8 gigabytes of ram, called proFusion: first fruits of the "Corollary" technology development which ran into mysterious delays earlier this year after Intel took over Corollary last summer.