Intel to intro Woodcrest on June 19th

WE'VE TALKED TO several sources in the industry and they are certain that the the launch of the first Intel processors made with full next-generation marchitecture will be for servers.

Woodcrests are set to make a debut on June the 19th, and there has been a certain number of journalists who swallowed a heavy Intel NDA and benchmarked systems equipped with Woodcrest CPUs at Intel premises in Oregon.

Anyway, here's the launch model list we've dug up so far. Contrast this with the table we published in April, here.

5110 - 1.60 GHz clock, 1066 MHz FSB, $230 per 1K CPU
5120 - 1.86 GHz clock, 1066 MHz FSB, $270 per 1K CPU
5130 - 2.00 GHz clock, 1333 MHz FSB, $330 per 1K CPU
5140 - 2.33 GHz clock, 1333 MHz FSB, $470 per 1K CPU
5150 - 2.67 GHz clock, 1333 MHz FSB, $700 per 1K CPU
5160 - 3.00 GHz clock, 1333 MHz FSB, $851 per 1K CPU

As you can see for yourself, pricing is very agressive. All the CPUs come with 4MB of shared L2 cache. The CPU is manufactured on a 65 nanometre process, which helps Intel attack AMD on pricing.

As we said here, the core will be a monstrous floating point cruncher.

However, while the Woodcrest CPU is a monster, that's only in single and dual socket terms. The 1066/1333 MHz Front Side Bus kicks everything in single and dual socket configurations, but not by four dual core Opterons. The FSB and the memory controller inside the north bridge just cannot handle more than four cores at once and that bottleneck Intel cannot solve for quite some time.

AMD Rev. F CPUs with the new Socket F will probably hold the ground in the 4P arena, but K8L really should be introduced by the end of this year or in Q1'07 by the latest.

When it comes to thermal dissipation, Woodcrest is set for 80 Watt TDP, but that is only "typical" power dissipation, while both current and Rev F Opties are set at a maximum dissipation of 89 Watts. In the real world the result is the same: Intel finally caught up with the Opterons at the CPU level.

But, Intel carries a burden of a north bridge which will add an extra 10-30 watts, which is quite an overhead to be added. µ