Intel's XEON and Iwill's DX400-SN

Expense is relative. This is something I have learned in the years that I have been employed in the computer industry. What I used to think cost too much now looks more reasonable to me. Similarly, when it comes to big business, what some of us may find an obscene amount of money is shrugged off with ease. This is something I am going to ask you to keep in mind as you read this article. Remember, what may seem outrageous to you, often seems perfectly reasonable to someone else.

Intel's XEON line of processors was born back in the days of yore with the venerable P6 core that we have all come to know and love. Today marks the release of the first XEON based on the new Pentium 4 core. This product, as it is presented to you today, is Intel's next stab at the high-end workstation and server market. It will begin humbly, as an extension of the Pentium 4 into the dual-processor realm, and over the next half a year it will evolve into a fully-fledged server solution.

The codename, Foster, has been sloughed off for the more recognizable name, XEON - so for the purpose of this article I will refer to the processor simply as XEON. It will be released today at speeds of 1.4Ghz, 1.5Ghz, and 1.7Ghz in a socket 603 package with the same amount of onboard cache as the current Pentium 4 line. That means 8kb of L1 and 256kb of L2 for now. I will go into that in-depth later on in the article.

Figure 1.1 /// XEONs Figure 1.2 /// XEON Lid Figure 1.3 /// XEON Pins

To support this new processor, motherboards based on Intel's i860 or Colusa chipset have also been announced today. The Iwill DX400-SN was used for the testing and is the first of its kind. it is a no-holds-barred workstation class board as I assume all the motherboards supporting the XEON will be.

Understanding the XEON core is not difficult if you understand the core of the Pentium 4. The reason for this, as I am sure you may have guessed, is that currently the Pentium 4 and XEON are almost identical. For this reason I am not going to regurgitate the architecture of this processor in-depth. If you would like to read very detailed accounts of the core architecture, I suggest you go here, or for an excellent article on the latest Pentium 4, go here. These two articles contain the nitty-gritty on just about every detail of the Pentium 4 core architecture, so if you are interested, I recommend them highly.