Intel Corp’s Coppermine launch of 15 new processors, all shipping in volume and all in the company’s new .18 micron silicon process technology, was billed as the largest launch in Intel’s 31 year history at the press event in San Jose on Monday. Nine new Pentium III desktop processors, ranging in clock speeds from 500MHz to 733MHz, three Pentium III Xeons for workstations and servers at 600, 667 and 733MHz, and three Mobile Pentium IIIs at 400, 450 and 500MHz made up the tally. They also come with other architectural improvements. These include an Advanced Transfer Cache, said to deliver a performance boost of up to 25% on its own, Advanced System Buffering, on-die level two cache, support for the 133MHz front side bus for faster data transfer, and new packaging options to fit inside ultra-thin mobiles and small form-factor PCs.
Yet one major component – the 820 Camino supporting chipset – was missing from yesterday’s launch. Paul Otellini, executive VP and general manager of the Intel Architecture Business Group, refused to say if the company had now given a firm shipment date for the delayed 820 chipset to its OEMs. But he did say that he now expects Camino to begin shipping this quarter. Pat Gelsinger, VP and general manager of the Desktop Products Group, later said that the company is now in the final stages of evaluation and is confident that the first shipments would be made this quarter. Meanwhile, the company did launch its expected 840 chipset, optimized for workstations and already validated for use with two RIMMs (Rambus in-memory modules), as Camino is not. Despite speculation, it is not likely that we will see widespread use of the 840 in desktops as a Camino substitute, nor in servers.
The shift to .18 micron at Intel is now accelerating. Four fabrication plants, in Oregon, Arizona, South Carolina and Israel are now producing .18 micron components, with Fab 11 in New Mexico the next to come on-stream early in the new year. The new chips use six layers of aluminum metal interconnect rather than five, and transistors that, at .13 micron, are already a generation ahead in terms of process technology. Using .18 micron gives Intel the option of lower voltages – from 1.1 to 1.65 volts, compared to the previous lowest of 1.35 – which is particularly useful for mobile systems. It also enables a 20% reduction in packaging size. Intel says it can now manufacture chips using different packaging on the same production lines.
Intel hopes to make further in-roads into the workstation market with the combination of the new Pentium III Xeons and the 840 chipset. Using the 133MHz system bus, 64-bit dual 66MHz PCI I/O support, and dual memory channels, each supporting up to two Rambus Inc RDRAM modules for a total memory bandwidth of 3.2 Gbps, Intel says it has increased system bus performance by one third, and memory bandwidth by four times. Graphics performance is also doubled through use of the 840, according to Intel. The 840, which supports dual processor Pentium III or Xeon configurations, comes in two versions, a core version and a scalable version, the latter adding a P64H controller hub and two memory repeater chips to the set.
For servers, Intel has volume priced its new Xeon chips to make them viable for two-way configurations, more suitable for front- end e-commerce and business computing customers. Those will also offer headroom for later expansion, it says. Further large cache options will be available next year. Xeon prices start at $505 for the 600MHz version in quantities of 1,000. The 667MHz version costs $655 and the 733MHz version $826. (For details of the Mobile and Desktop Pentium families, see separate stories).
