IBM joins train to Clovertown

ONCE UPON A TIME, the usual suspects would roll out their new specs within moments of each other as soon as Intel gave its say-so on new chips. These days, with dozens of SKUs appearing each year, the process tends to be a bit more of a drip-drip affair.

Dell cranked up its PR action with predictable efficiency earlier this week and now IBM is disclosing its plans for Clovertown, the erstwhile codename for Xeon 5300 quad-core chips. HP et al will surely follow although to some extent this is a phoney war. Dell is taking orders now but won't start deliveries until 17 November. IBM will take orders from the 14th but for both Dell and IBM, most deliveries will appear from December.

IBM will slot Clovertown into System x 2U and 1U rack models, blades and tower servers. AS with Dell, Big Blue sees virtualisation as one way to soak up the extra horse power.

Regular readers will recall these are the dual-core Xeon 5100 ‘Woodcrest' parts lying side by side -- like stone replicas of kings and queens in a mausoleum, or lovers in a state of post-coital conjugal bliss -- on a multi-chip module. Although the strategy was dubbed ‘Franken-quad' by AMD snipers, Intel clearly saw the time-to-market benefit of the approach and early benchmarks seem to be reward its strategy and chutzpah. µ