Intel unveils Prestonia's successor, Nocona

Bringing Banias to servers too

Intel's IA-64 Itanium isn't going to kill Xeon - at least not before 2004. Instead, server-oriented processors based on the IA-32 architecture will continue to be developed and launched through 2003.

So the company said at Microprocessor Forum yesterday, when it announced Nocona, a Pentium 4-derived processor aimed at the "high volume, dual-processor server market", Intel Enterprise Architecture Lab director Dileep Bhandarkar said.

As you can see from our Intel server roadmap, Nocona will follow the arrival of Prestonia, the 0.13 micron Xeon die-shrink aimed at uni- and dual-processor servers early next year and, in Q4 2002, Gallatin, the version of Prestonia modelled for four- and eight-way machines. Nocona is essentially a faster version of Prestonia.

Prestonia will debut next March at 2.2GHz, rising to beyond 2.53GHz through the year. Gallatin will arrive in Q4, at over 1.6GHz and with at least 2MB of on-die L3 cache.

Nocona, like Prestonia and Gallatin, will be branded as a Xeon processor.

Bhandarkar also said that Banias, Intel's next-generation of mobile processor, will also make its way into the company's server product line as a chip for high-density servers, replacing the company's current Tualatin-based Pentium III-S processors. Like Nocona, Banias is due to ship in Q3. ®