December 19, 2006

Last week, Intel has rolled out another quad-core chip, the Xeon E-5335. This follows Intel's quad-core Xeon 5300 and its Core 2 extreme quad-core processor set of products announced a in November. But Intel is rolling out its E5335 a full two months in advance that what is announced previously.

Priced very close to its predecessors, Intel's new offerings are nonetheless better performers. This represents a 30 to 70 percent increase, depending upon the specific CPU, explained Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

Some analysts have been suggesting that Intel's new offering is basically a pair of Duo Core processors patched together to beat AMD's planned introduction of its own quad-core products early in 2007, he stated.

While King conceded the technical veracity of these claims, he suggested the power and performance of the new Intel offerings still merit some attention.

"By pushing these processors out two months early, Intel can rightfully claim they are first to get the quad core on an x86 to market," added King.

While congratulating Intel on basically refreshing its entire product line, King is nonetheless concerned that the server vendors will be overwhelmed by the blizzard of new Intel processors coming their way in 2007.

"If I am a consumer of Intel-based server products, the offerings' pipeline is getting awfully crowded right now. Seven or eight different Woodcrest chips were introduced in June 2006. Now you have got another four of these quad-core chips" said King.

He added "sorting out which processor is best for your particular workload is going to be a fairly complicated process."

For the server vendor, this is not just a box where you are plugging these processors in, added King. "There is a lot of testing, developing time and money involved."

Another IT industry analyst, Joe Clabby also praised the new Intel Quad-Core offerings, but he told eChannelLine the Nov. 14 marketing press release issued by the giant processor vendor is misleading. "This is one of worst written and trickiest announcements that I have read for a long time."

In one excerpt from the release, the company stated that "Intel began the transition to multi-core technology four years ago with Intel Hyper-threading technology, followed by the introduction of the industry's first dual-core PC processors in April last year."

Clabby stated he doubts that Intel was considering multi-core at all that long ago. He also said Intel was focused on threading for single core fast gigahertz machines until about a year ago.

The mixing of multi-core and threading together in the Intel statement appears to be designed "to confuse people," he observed.

"Threading is when you take an application and break it up into multiple threads that can be driven through a processor or multiple processors simultaneously and then gathered up at the end to produce a result."

Left out of the Nov. 14 release, Clabby continued, is an acknowledgement that rival competitor AMD produced the first multi-core processors and that Intel only came out with a dual core processor last year.

"You don't have to dig very hard to find out [Intel was] behind in dual core, for a long period of time."

The latest Intel quad core products are "good," added Clabby. He just wished that "Intel had been a little more forthright."

Source: Integrated M.A.R.