Intel confirms Xeon switch to Prescott-2M, and more

From the HEXUS front page, posted by Ryszard:

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Intel held a bullish 64-bit conference call with press today, to confirm where Intel are going with 64-bit on the desktop with Pentium 4, and in the workstation and server space with Xeon DP and Xeon MP.

They confirmed that they'd shipped their first million 64-bit Xeon DPs (Nocona) in six months at the tail-end of 2004, outsselling plain 32-bit versions in Q4. They expect to sell the next million in the first three months of 2005 and have Nocona and Prescott-2M based DP make up 80% of all Xeon DPs sold in 2005.

Their focus for Xeon is to move it to the upcoming Prescott-2M core with DP and MP, along with a large 8MM L3 MP variant sometime in the latter half of this year. Xeon DP's mirroring of the Pentium 4 product range lets them focus on a smaller number of specific die variations for their processor range. Think of a Xeon DP now as a dual-processor validated Pentium 4, on Socket 604. Xeon MP (8-way capable) will feature the same core too, along with the aforementioned 8MB L3 version (Potomac), running on the i8500 core logic (Twin Castle).

All feature EIST (Enhanced SpeedStep) and at least DDR2-400 support from their core logic. The Xeon MP platform in 2005 gets a dual-core processor or two on independant 667MHz busses.

On the desktop the 6xx Pentium 4, which launches soon, has EM64T (Intel's x86-64 implementation) capability and uses the new Prescott-2M core, with 2MB of L2 cache memory, EIST, the NX bit, SSE3 and HyperThreading.

We'll cover those products as and when they launch. Power-managed large cache seems to be the order of the day for at least 2005 in the desktop and server space.