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Intel ships Profusion SMP chipset, announces large cache Xeons

Eleven OEMs to announce later on today

As expected, for quite some time, Intel will today announce details of its "Profusion" symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) chipset. At the same time it will roll out Slot Two Xeon processors with 1Mb and 2Mb caches. The so-called "building blocks" for SMP systems will be processors with caches of 512K, 1Mb and2Mb, the Profusion chipset itself and the Saber (Corollary) board which will hold all these parts together. Intel claims it has 1000s of complete systems validated throughout the marketplace, using different operating environments. It has support for its SMP family from most of the big names you could imagine, including IBM, Dell, and HP. So far, 11 OEMs have announced systems, and 15 more are on the way, said Intel. The eight way systems actually use a bridge to link together two four way systems, and Intel is hoping to knock larger players using RISC based chips, such as HP, Dell and IBM, off their Unix pedestals. All these players, of course, are also releasing x.86 based systems. NT, said Intel, will scale past four processors. It is pushing eight-way systems as a cost-affordable SMP system. However, the figure Intel is mentioning is 1.6 times, which is not an enormous performance boost. ®

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