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Intel chooses Comdex to debut low-voltage server Tualatins

700MHz, 1.1V part first of the line

Intel will launch a new line of processors for ultra-dense servers at Comdex, sources close to the company have whispered to CNet.

Indeed, it will, as a quick look at our take on Intel's server chip roll-out diary shows - the chip is due to ship sometime this quarter and Comdex is as good a launch vehicle as any. The part will be a 700MHz Low-voltage Pentium III, fabbed at 0.13 micron and as such part of the Tualatin family of chips. Like other Tualatins, the chip is expected to contain 512KB of on-die L2 cache. It will operate a 100MHz frontside bus. The core will run at 1.1V.

As a server, the part will almost certainly ship as a Pentium III-S.

We can add that this is just the first in a line of chips aimed at ultra-dense servers - machines that contain stacks of server-on-a-card units called 'blades'. Two 800MHz parts are due next February, for instance, one a Low Voltage part, the other an Ultra-low Voltage chip. Such designations match the equivalent mobile PIIIs, which are aimed at mini- and sub-notebooks, respectively.

Later next year, Intel will release 900MHz Ultra-low Voltage and 933MHz Low Voltage PIII-S chips.

That gives Transmeta a broad time frame in which to get its own, competing products out the door. Aimed at mobiles they may be, but the company's Crusoes are equally applicable to dense servers, a market Transmeta is trying harder to pursue.

With the 800MHz TM5800 only expected to go into volume production this month (ie. it's still not definite) and the 1GHz part not due until sometime during the first half of 2001, Transmeta had better get a move on if it's to use clock speed to compete with Intel. ®

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