In the past few weeks, we showed you Intel's future plans for their consumer, business and mobile CPUs and chipsets. The value market sports Celeron processors, with Timna coming later this year. The mid-range sports slower Pentium IIIs, moving up to the faster versions. The high-end now comes with up to 1GHz Pentium IIIs, with Willamette in the future. But that leaves out a significant part of the market.
Beyond the consumer products, you have the workstation and server markets, both of which currently sport higher clocked Pentium IIIs and Pentium III Xeons in multiple CPU setups. But what will Intel come out with in the future for the workstation market? If you want to find out about Foster/Colusa and when it is coming, as well as what we believe to be the main thrust of Intel's workstation strategy, this is the place.
This roadmap shows what we believe are Intel's future plans for the workstation market. We compiled this roadmap after speaking with multiple sources close to Intel. We then compared our sources' information and filtered it through our own knowledge to bring you this roadmap.
Remember as you read, that plans change. Changing market conditions require Intel to adapt. These are what we believe to be Intel's current plans. We will start with what we see are major trends in Intel's server and workstation roadmap, then we will move on to give specifics about each of Intel's market segments.
Intel's current workstation CPUs are the familiar Pentium III for the low-end and the Pentium III Xeon for the mid-range and high-end. The Xeon is essentially a Pentium III in SECC packaging using a SC330 connector. There are two classes of Xeon. One class of Xeon comes with 512K, 1MB, or 2MB of full-speed level 2 cache integrated into the packaging, and is designed for use in systems with up to eight processors using a 100MHz system bus. They are most similar to the pre-Coppermine Pentium IIIs with off-die cache. These are sometimes referred to as large cache products. The other class of Xeon comes with 256K of full-speed on-die Advanced Transfer Cache (ATC), and is designed for use in systems with up to two processors using a 133MHz system bus. They are most similar to the Coppermine Pentium III, which also sports 256K of full-speed on-die ATC.