Intel no longer 24 hours from Tulsa chips

AS PREDICTED a while ago, Intel has started shipping its 7100 series Xeon chips, which carried the code name Tulsa.

Intel claims the chips offer up to twice the performance and three times better performance per watt over previous Paxville Intel Xeon MP chips.

A Dell Poweredge using the 71400M dual core Tulsa churned out 16,320QpH using the TPC-H benchmark, testing databases.

The Xeon MP Tulsas include VT and Pellston or "cache safe technology" and have 1.3 billion transistors and 16MB of shared cache.

The power consumption varies depending on the chips - some eat up 95W while others consume 150W. AMD Opteron chips aimed at the same server sector eat 95W. AMD has responded to the release of the MP Xeons by essentially saying Intel is overegging the cake - its Opterons, it believes, will still beat Chipzilla on the energy stakes.

The Xeon M and the N suffixes, as previously explained in the pages of the INQ, designate bus speed of 800MHz and 667MHz respectively. The highest clock speed is for the 7140M at 3.40GHz and with 16MB of cache, costing $1,980 if you're going to buy 1,000 of them. Other chips in the series offer 4MB of cache with lower prices.

Design wins include Fujitsu-Siemens, HP, Dell and IBM boxes. Tulsa has been long in the making, but as early as May this year was slated for the first quarter of 2007. Intel has managed to drag Tulsa forward into the third quarter.

* INTEL announced its Merom notebook chips yesterday - it will be a few weeks before you see them in notebooks. These, like the Cointreau desktop chips, are also being branded as Core 2 Duo. This could be confusing for an average punter.

See Also
Intel only 24 hours from Tulsa
Intel prices up Woodcrest, Tulsa server chips
Intel's Otellini drops four processor bombshell 24 hours from Tulsa