Dual Tualatin vs Dual Foster Xeon

[Kunal]

Although there are no benchmarks for this, and quite a few of you may have caught this one over the weekend, its well worth mentioning:

TheInquirer.Net
NOT ONLY do the latest Tualatin microprocessors run cool as cool can be, but if you bung them in a dual processor configuration they will thrash the pants off dual Foster Xeons, The Inquirer can reveal.

Sources at La Intella tell us that because of this strange and uncomfortable fact, Intel will never produce or allow to be produced any such configurations.

One engineer who saw the results of the systems La had put together for herself, told us that the benchmarks from the dual Tualatin "were quite astonishing".

However, the thrust is now firmly in the direction of the Pentium 4 and the Foster Xeons, and so the dream configuration will never see the light of day.

This decision is being made due to the irresistible power of "marchitecture". µ

Will Intel disable SMP in the new P3's?
Will they not work on existing dual P3 boards?

More importantly, Tualatin being 0.13micron, is this a preview of what Northwood, and Northwood Xeon will accomplish?

------------------
This is my world.
I let you live in it!

developerXnet

Hardware & Gaming Industry News - Coming July 2001

[Arcadian]

Tualatin will likely be very good performance, or at least performance that will scale with frequency. It isn't all that astonishing to imagine a 1.26GHz Tualatin beating a 1.5GHz Pentium 4. After all, the 1GHz Coppermine nearly beats the 1.3GHz Pentium 4. Close in the distance, and you will begin to overlap performance.

However, I don't see this being a huge issue. Tualatin is going to take a while to ramp up, as more of Intel's fabs support 130nm design rules. By the time Tualatin moves to HVM, Pentium 4 will also be on a 130nm process that can scale to much larger heights.

Also, Tualatin will most likely be SMP enabled for the server version, due to launch very soon. I can see the possibility that the desktop version will have this disabled, but very likely, server Tualatins will fit in desktop boards, allowing a small premium for extra cache and SMP support, if that's what you want.