Intel Advances Prestonia, Cancels Two-Way Foster
Intel Corp. has confirmed that the company has advanced the introduction of its next-generation Prestonia server chip while canceling a dual-processor Foster workstation chip. To Intel, the decision was made because the company's next-generation microprocessor and process technology were sufficiently advanced to warrant the change. In addition, Intel's server roadmap was compressed enough that customers might have had difficulty in deciding which chip to choose, officials said.
Officially, the Prestonia chip is now due sometime before mid-February, or the first half of the first quarter 2002, according to a spokesman from Intel, headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif. Originally, Prestonia was due sometime in the first quarter of 2002. The two-way Foster chip was expected during the fourth quarter of this year.
"The main thing is that our next generation looks so healthy that we decided to accelerate it," the spokesman said.
Intel's server roadmap is a bit messy already. Intel's Foster microprocessor, based on the Pentium 4, was officially launched in March specifically for four-way servers and above, a smaller market segment than two-way machines. A Foster chip for workstations is still on track for launch at the end of September, the spokesman said.
Because the two two-way server processors were scheduled to be introduced within a month of each other, it made more sense to eliminate the Foster version and eliminate customer confusion, the Intel spokesman said.
"Our thinking was that Prestonia delivered a triple shot of performance," according to the Intel spokesman: a faster 2.2-GHz clock speed, larger on-chip caches of both 256-Kbytes and 512-Kbytes, and a finer 0.13-micron process. The scheduled Foster chip was slated to be manufactured at 2.0-GHz on a 0.18-micron process.
Since Prestonia was scheduled to be launched sometime within the three-month period of the first quarte 2002r, moving it to "early in the first quarter" doesn't necessarily indicate a change. The spokesman wasn't able to specify the number of weeks the processor was advanced, or reveal the old launch date.
"That far in advance, I don't even know if we had a date," he said. "But this isn't spin."
