Intel launches new Gallatin processor

SAN FRANCISCO – Intel Corp. on Tuesday launched a new, faster version of its Xeon processor MP chip for multiprocessor systems, code-named Gallatin.

With a 3.0GHz clock speed and 4M bytes of level three (L3) cache, the fastest version of Gallatin, which was originally launched in November 2002, will have twice the cache of its 2.8GHz predecessor and deliver as much as 24 percent better performance compared to previous Xeon MP chips, Intel said.

Intel will also provide two other versions of Gallatin, according to Richard Dracott, Intel’s general manager of enterprise marketing and planning. There will be 2.7GHz and 2.2GHz versions with 2M bytes of L3 cache, he said during a conference call Tuesday morning. “What we’re doing here is essentially breathing new life into a platform that’s been around a few years,” he said, referring to Intel’s Xeon processor family.

The new chip is a fairly significant improvement for the Xeon MP line, said Gordon Haff, an analyst with Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, New Hampshire. The doubling of the on-chip cache works particularly well to increase the performance of multiprocessor servers running commercial applications such as transaction processing, he said.

Because multiprocessor servers put a larger strain on the memory subsystem, increased amounts of on-chip cache can help alleviate that load, Haff said. Cache stores frequently used data in a repository close to the chip’s execution units so that it can be processed faster than data stored in memory.

But the improvements to the new chip are still overshadowed by Intel’s recent decision to bring 64-bit extensions technology to its Xeon DP processors for one and two-processor servers.

The new Xeon MP chip announced Tuesday does not include the 64-bit extensions, which are planned for the next scheduled release on Intel’s Xeon MP road map, code-named Potomac.

Intel is positioning Xeon MP as a platform for database, application server and enterprise resource planning application consolidation. Thomson Financial, for example, used Xeon MP processors as it migrated its Thomson First Call Web application to a new financial information system called Thomson One Analytics. First Call ran on Sun Microsystems Inc.’s UltraSparc processors, but the new Thomson One Analytics system is powered by Unisys Corp. servers based on Xeon MP and Itanium 2 processors from Intel.

Thomson chose to consolidate a variety of its financial databases and Web serving applications on a number of “extremely powerful” Intel-based machines that allowed Thomson to grow the complexity of its application while improving speed by approximately 25 percent, according to Jeremy Lehman, Thomson Financial’s senior vice president of technology.

An added benefit was cost, said Lehman. “We’re not limited in having our capital tied up in expensive systems,” he said, referring to Sun’s servers.

Several vendors are expected to offer systems based on the new Xeon MP chips, including Unisys, which starts shipping its ES7000 systems with the chips in April. Hewlett-Packard Co. currently ships 4-way and 8-way ProLiant DL560, DL580, DL740 and DL760 servers based on the new processors.

IBM Corp. is now shipping the processors in its xSeries 255, 365 and 445 systems, with two-processor configurations priced at US$7,358, $15,599, and $18,617, respectively. The company is also shipping the new Gallatin chips in its HS40 blade servers, with a base price of $12,359 for a dual-processor system.

Effective Tuesday, Dell Inc. will ship PowerEdge 6650 and 6600 4-way servers based on the new Xeon MP processors. Single processor systems based on Intel’s top-of-the line 3.0GHz chip will start at $7,499. A single-processor PowerEdge 6600 based on the 2.2GHz processor will start at $4,999.

Intel lists the 3.0GHz Xeon MP for $3,692. The 2.7GHz and 2.2GHz versions list for $1,980 and $1,177, respectively.

Tom Krazit, of the IDG News Service contributed to this story.